Nationwide Neoliberalism Experiments

The neoliberal ideology of Mises, Hayek and Freidman (et al) has now heavily influenced much of the developed and developing world, creating economic, political, and social disasters from Thailand to South Africa to El Salvador. But its biggest openly-declared national-scale experiments were kicked off in 1973 in Chile, 1981 in the United States, and 1991 in Russia.

In each case, rejecting a democratic government “of, by and for the people” and replacing it with a corporatist government “of, by and for the corporate and wealthy” has produced widespread disaster.

There is literally not one single example of any country in the world that put into place neoliberal policies that hasn’t turned into a violent police state (Chile), devasted its own working class while producing a bumper crop of billionaires (the United States and the United Kingdom), or both (Russia).

Milton Friedman Hearts General Pinochet

One of the most famous examples of neoliberal shock to a nation’s system came in Chile half a century ago.

In 1971, Chile accounted for 20 percent of the world’s known copper reserves; copper was then the world’s most valuable commercial metal (iron was #2) and represented fully three-quarters of that nation’s export earnings.[liv] [lv] And those earnings represented only a small portion of the actual value of the copper Chile exported because three massive American companies, Anaconda, Kennecott, and Cerro (referred to by Chileans as the Gran Minería) claimed to own roughly 80 percent of all that nation’s copper, remnants of 19^th century US claims to the mines.

The Chilean people had long chafed under this foreign ownership and exploitation of the nation’s single largest asset, as well as the way these foreign companies treated Chilean workers and miners.

Under President Frei Montalva through the 1960s the country negotiated a gradual and partial purchase of about half of the mines from the companies, but there was still widespread popular discontent around the issue.[lvi] Imagine how Texans might feel, for example, if 80 percent of all the oil and natural gas in that state was owned by Mexican companies and shipped to Mexico without any reimbursement other than paying taxes to the state of Texas.

As a result, Salvador Allende Gossen was elected president in 1970, after campaigning on fully nationalizing what copper was left in the mines (20% of the world’s reserves). The legislation to do this was presented to the country’s parliament in 1971 and overwhelmingly passed, with even the far-right National Party throwing in all their votes.

A Marxist, Allende had already nationalized the country’s banks by simply purchasing all the bank’s stock on the open market at competitive prices. Over 3 years he nationalized a total of 91 industries, increasing wages and lifting substantial portions of the working poor out of poverty.

On October 28^th 1971 Allende opened a special tribunal in Santiago to determine how much Chile should reimburse the Gran Minería companies. After public hearings, they determined that the companies had done so much damage to both the mines and Chile’s working people and economy that they should pay Chile for some of the copper they’d recently taken out of the country: Kennecott owed Chile, they said, $310 million; Anaconda owed them $78 million; and Cerro, which had been less exploitative of Chilean workers and resources, would receive $18 million from the Chilean state.[lvii]

This set off fireworks in Richard Nixon’s White House, with Henry Kissinger and Nixon’s CIA beside themselves. Nationalization of a country’s natural resources was, they believed, the first step down the road toward total communism, even though Socialist Allende was a pragmatic politician with no intention of disrupting most of the rest of his country’s industries. Capitalism was generally fine with Allende, so long as was Chilean-owned, paid workers well and acted responsibly in the nation’s interest.

But the pressure was on from the copper giants and, when Allende also took the nation’s telecommunications system away from American-owned International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), which owned 70 percent of the system, Nixon decided to act.

As The New York Times reported in July of 1973:

“The International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation submitted to the White House last October an 18‐point plan designed to assure that the Government of Chile’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende Gossen, ‘does not get through the crucial next six months.’ …

“The I.T.T. plan called for extensive economic warfare against Chile to be directed by a special White House task force, assisted by the Central Intelligence Agency; the subversion of the Chilean armed forces; consultations with foreign governments on ways to put pressure on the Allende regime, and diplomatic sabotage.”[lviii]

Nixon authorized $10 million for a covert operation in Chile, specifying that the US Embassy in Santiago was to know nothing about it.[lix]

Allende was tremendously popular in Chile. While Richard Nixon had been elected president in 1972 with the votes of only 35 percent of eligible American voters, Allende’s party had won 37 percent of the 1970 popular vote. He was then elected president by an overwhelming majority in the Parliament, and 800,000 people – one tenth of the entire population of Chile – showed up in Santiago for a huge celebration.

Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA decided to take action, and launched a campaign against Allende that included economic pressure and an alignment with the Chilean military through a general who’d led the so-called Nazi Cell within the Chilean army, firing on and killing striking workers in 1967. General Pinochet had “been several times to the U.S. Southern Command schools in the Panama Canal Zone and has served as military attaché in Washington,” having famously said, “The army’s duty is to kill.” [lx]

On September 11^th 1973 – a 9/11 that Chileans claim as their own – General Augusto Pinochet rolled his tanks and led his soldiers into Santiago while the army and air force bombed the presidential palace. The attack was preceded by hundreds of truckers (some funded and guided by IT&T and the CIA) blocking parts of the city for weeks, shutting down commerce to protest the leftwing tilt of the Allende government.[lxi]

President Allende gave a final address to the nation via radio, then, seeing where things were heading, shot himself in the head.

The violent coup was a shock to Chile. The country had one of the most advanced democracies on the continent, having 160 years of elected governments, the most recent run of democracy in the country lasting 41 years until Pinochet and the CIA took it down.

But Pinochet and the CIA had done their homework; the entire Chilean military went along with the coup. They then proceeded to round up the opposition, arresting and imprisoning over 13,000 people who were seen as allies and supporters of the Allende government. Thousands were taken to the National Stadium, where many were tortured and hundreds were executed. As Rupert Cornwall noted in The Independent, those numbers didn’t even include the “200,000 people who were forced into exile to escape persecution or worse.”[lxii]

By way of intimidating any Chileans who may think about joining opposition to Pinochet’s government, the military routinely left mutilated bodies on roadsides and in the country’s drainage and irrigation canals.

As The New York Times noted when Pinochet died:

“[D]uring his rule, more than 3,200 people were executed or disappeared, and scores of thousands more were detained and tortured or exiled. …

“The press was censored, and labor strikes and unions were banned. A fearsome security apparatus known as the National Intelligence Directorate, or DINA, persecuted, tortured and killed Pinochet opponents within Chile and sometimes beyond its borders. A government-commissioned report issued in 2004 concluded that almost 28,000 people had been tortured during the general’s rule. …

“Tens of thousands of Allende sympathizers were rounded up and brutally interrogated. A majority of the killings took place in the first three months, long after resistance had ended. In most cases, prisoners from a slum or agrarian community would be executed as a means of terrorizing their neighbors into accepting military rule. The killings were often cynically, and falsely, justified as cases in which prisoners were shot while trying to escape. ”[lxiii]

The blank slate of a new Chile offered the perfect laboratory for Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” to try out their exciting new neoliberal experiment. With encouragement from Nixon’s administration, Pinochet brough in a group of economists who’d studied under Friedman and his acolytes, including Chilean economist Sergio de Castro.

They privatized most of the industries Allende had nationalized, threw open the nation’s retail systems to foreign-made products, abandoned wage and price regulations and labor protections, and increased military spending while cutting overall government spending by 10 percent. Pinochet even privatized the nation’s social security system, turning it over to the newly-privatized banks.

The result was an official 375 percent rate of inflation in 1974 (the highest in the world at that time) as cheap imports flooded the country, factories shut down, and workers and families were thrown onto the streets. Food and other necessities were estimated to have gone up as much as 1000 percent in price as malnutrition and hunger haunted the nation’s children.[lxiv]

The Chicago Boys were in a crisis as their experiment seemed to be collapsing all around them, so they convinced Pinochet to bring Milton Friedman himself to Chile to encourage people to continue with the Grand Experiment.

In Friedman’s memoir co-authored with his wife, Two Lucky People, he describes what he laid out to the Chilean people during his March, 1975 visit. “If this shock approach were adopted,” he wrote, “I believe it should be announced publicly in great detail, to take effect at a very close date.”

Pinochet’s 10 percent cut in government spending was way too timid, Friedman thought. Instead, he wrote, it should include:

“A commitment by the government to reduce government spending by 25 percent within six months, the reduction to take the form of across-the-board reduction of every separate budget by 25 percent, the personnel separations [firings of government employees] to take place as soon as possible…”

This gutting of the Chilean government wouldn’t really have much impact on the average person, Friedman said. “The discharge of present government employees will not reduce output but simply eliminate waste – their discharge will not mean the production of one fewer pair of shoes or one fewer loaf of bread.”

Betraying a certain self-consciousness, he added, “[S]ome of the poorest classes will be affected and whether they are or not, the program will be blamed for their distress.”

Summarizing his message to Pinochet and the Chilean people, Friedman notes, “Such a shock program could end inflation in months and would set the stage for the solution of your second major problem – promoting an effective social market economy.”

The problems with Chile’s economy two years into the Chicago Boy’s and Pinochet’s grand experiment were not at all the fault of Friedman’s neoliberal prescription, he wrote.

“This problem is not of recent origin. It arises from trends toward socialism that started 40 years ago and reached their logical – and terrible – climax in the Allende regime. You have been extremely wise in adopting the many measures you have already taken to reverse this trend.”

Pinochet took it to heart and by 1980 public spending under Pinochet was half what it had been when he seized power. But the economy was still in crisis.

“Undeterred,” Naomi Klein writes in Shock Doctrine, “Pinochet’s economic team went into more experimental territory, introducing Friedman’s most vanguard policies: the public school system was replaced by vouchers and charter schools, health care became pay-as-you-go, and kindergartens and cemeteries were privatized. Most radical of all, they privatized Chile’s social security system.”

Ironically, Klein notes, “The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in the early eighties was that Pinochet had never privatized Codelco, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile’s export revenues, which meant that when the financial bubble burst, the state sill had a steady source of funds.”[lxv]

In the end it had all been a futile exercise, as The New York Times noted in Pinochet’s obituary noted in December, 2006:

“But by the time of his death, even some of those economic victories had been called into question. The privatizing of Chile’s social security system, in particular, has come under attack as unjust and is undergoing revision. And across Latin America, many of the countries that had adopted similar reforms are reversing some of them, responding to a growing wave of popular, leftist anger over untrammeled foreign competition and unequal distribution of wealth.”[lxvi]

The neoliberals still largely control Chile, although they’ve become more like Bill Clinton than Augusto Pinochet. But the results are visible. Chile has Latin America’s top GDP per capita but that income and wealth is hardly well distributed; its poverty level is even higher than that of Brazil.

As economic scholar Branko Milanovic note in November 2019, “The bottom 5 percent of Chile’s population have an income level that is about the same as that of the bottom 5 percent in Mongolia. The top 2 percent enjoy an income level equivalent to that of the top 2 percent in Germany. … Chile is the country where billionaires’ share, in terms of GDP, is the highest in the world…The wealth of Chile’s billionaires, compared to their country’s GDP, exceeds even that of Russia’s.”[lxvii]

In his book The Pinochet File, Peter Kornbluh writes:

“The military regime’s problems began in mid-1982 when the country suffered its worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Gross national product plummeted by 14 percent; unemployment rose to 30 percent. Chile’s foreign debt reached $19 billion, then the highest per-capita debt in the world. The ‘economic miracle’ created by the University of Chicago-trained students of free market guru and regime advisor Milton Friedman was discredited.”[lxviii]

Although neoliberal “scholars” and think-tanks funded by American rightwing billionaires have gone to astonishing lengths to try to portray Friedman and Pinochet’s experiment with neoliberalism a success (just check the internet: there are 20 praising them for every one criticizing them), the simple reality is that the Chilean experiment, the world’s first real try at neoliberalism, failed utterly…and killed a lot of people in the process.

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Note: Yesterday, I accidentally sent out today’s book excerpt, so today I’m sharing with you a post that I posted on my non-politics site, WisdomSchool.com. I hope you find it useful/interesting. —Thom

My father died in stages, the way most people do, and the four of us boys — me and my three brothers, our wives beside us — didn’t know what we were watching.

He’d had a stroke and couldn’t speak or meaningfully move for the week or so before he died; we didn’t know what he was feeling. We didn’t know what to say, or whether to say anything at all, whether to hold his hand or give him space, whether the grimace on his face was pain or something we were misreading entirely.

We didn’t know why he’d suddenly seemed so alert for a day, and we didn’t know what it meant when that passed. We were well-educated, reasonably worldly adults with decades of life experience between us, and we stood around that bed like children who’d wandered into a room where the grownups were speaking a language none of us had ever been taught.

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Not with guilt, exactly, though some of that is in there too. Mostly I’ve thought about it as a kind of cultural failure; a thing our society stopped teaching somewhere along the way and never bothered to replace.

For most of human history, people died at home, surrounded by family and neighbors who’d seen it before, who knew the signs, who understood the arc of it. Death was something a community witnessed together and held together.

Then we moved it into hospitals, handed it over to professionals, and quietly lost the knowledge that ordinary people once carried as a matter of course. Now we’re shocked, disoriented, and grief-stricken in ways that might be at least partly unnecessary, if only someone had thought to tell us what was coming and what it meant.

That’s why a piece published this month in the Washington Post was so meaningful to me. Written by Ashley Abramson, it’s about death doulas, a profession that barely existed twenty years ago and is now growing fast enough that the International End-of-Life Doula Association has trained nearly 6,500 doulas worldwide.

A death doula is a non-medical companion who provides emotional, spiritual, and practical support to people who are dying, and to the families around them. As Kristen Patterson, a death doula and end-of-life planner in Northern Virginia, puts it, a death doula is “a calm, compassionate presence who can be there for dying people and their loved ones in their final moments.”

They can read aloud, play music, advocate with medical providers, help navigate paperwork and final arrangements, and simply stay present in ways that hospice nurses — stretched thin and focused on clinical care — often can’t. People don’t always realize that hospice care isn’t 24/7, Patterson notes; it certainly wasn’t in our case (Dad died at home). A death doula can be there as much as the family needs.

But what I found most valuable in Abramson’s piece wasn’t the description of the role itself. It was the specific things that death doulas, from their long experience at bedsides, have learned about the dying process that most families simply don’t know going in. This is the kind of knowledge that can transform a terrifying experience into something that still holds space for love and even peace.

The first thing the doulas want you to know is that dying can be peaceful. Diane Button, a death doula in Northern California and the author of What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living, puts it simply: “Just like the body knows how to be born, it knows how to die.”

For people who’ve been living for months or years in bodies racked by illness, the transition can actually come as a relief. Jill Schock, founder of Death Doula LA, told the Post that many people are relaxed at the end, because dying feels better than continuing to live in a body that’s been suffering.

That’s not what most of us picture when we imagine death, but it’s what people who sit with the dying actually see. And Button adds that the most common regrets she witnesses aren’t about things left undone — vacations not taken, money not earned — but about things left unsaid. If you can get to a place of peace with your relationships before that time comes, the dying itself tends to go more gently.

The second thing the doulas want you to understand is that the dying person can still participate in shaping that experience. Even in a hospital room, you can fill the space with what matters: favorite music, beloved objects, the people and even the pets you love.

Erica Reid Gerdes, founder of Waxwing Journeys in Chicago, describes a client whose husband found real comfort in being able to play music from his wife’s favorite musical and read her favorite books to her in those final days. She was unresponsive by then, but as Reid Gerdes says, “We knew she could still hear.” That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.

Third: death doesn’t need to be painful. Many of us carry images of painful deaths we witnessed in earlier generations, but modern hospice care is specifically designed to manage symptoms including pain.

Part of a doula’s job is to make sure the dying person has adequate medication and isn’t suffering unnecessarily. And medication does something else, too — it can calm what’s called terminal agitation, something my family saw with Dad and had absolutely no framework for understanding.

When someone is actively dying, the shutting down of organs can affect brain function in ways that cause the person to pick at their clothing, claw at their bedsheets, or seem frightened and restless.

Seeing that in someone you love is alarming, even traumatic, if nobody has told you it’s a known and manageable part of the process. It has a name. It can be treated. You’re not watching your father suffer some unique and inexplicable torment: you’re watching something that happens, that doulas and hospice nurses have seen many times, and that medication can ease.

Fourth, and this one is critically important: it’s normal, even expected, for a dying person to stop eating and drinking near the end. The body simply needs less energy. Swallowing becomes too taxing. The Post article makes the point explicitly — you don’t need to urge someone who’s actively dying to eat or drink. It doesn’t deprive them the way it would deprive a healthy person.

Families often feel guilty about this, or frightened by it, and push food and water when the body is trying to do what it knows to do. A doula can gently explain that letting go of that particular effort is itself an act of love.

And fifth — this is the one I keep returning to when I think about those last days with my father — there’s a phenomenon called terminal lucidity, or an end-of-life rally. In the days just before death, many dying people experience a sudden surge of energy and clarity. After days of not talking much or eating, they perk up. They seem like themselves again.

Families often mistake this for improvement, for a turn in the right direction, and the hope it kindles makes what follows all the more devastating. What doulas know, from having witnessed it over and over, is that this rally is often the body’s final gathering before it lets go. It isn’t a sign of recovery. It can be a gift — a last real conversation, a last moment of connection — if you know how to receive it as such rather than as cause for false hope.

I wish someone had told us all of this before we walked into that room. I wish someone had sat us down and said: here’s what’s happening, here’s what to watch for, here’s what it means, here’s how you can be present for him rather than just frightened beside him.

That’s what a death doula does. That’s the knowledge that used to live inside communities and families and has largely been lost, and that a growing number of remarkable people are now working to restore.

INELDA and the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance both maintain directories where you can find certified doulas in your area. Death doulas are generally not covered by insurance, which is a policy failure worth fighting about separately, but the field is having conversations about Medicare reimbursement and pro bono work for those who can’t pay. If the financial barrier is real for you, ask; many doulas offer sliding scales or even volunteer their time.

But even if you’re nowhere near this moment in your own life, I’d urge you to read Abramson’s piece in the Post, and to have the conversation with the people you love before it becomes urgent. Talk about what you’d want. Ask what they’d want. Write it down. The conversation itself is an act of love, and it costs nothing except the willingness to be honest about the one thing none of us can avoid.

My father never got to tell us what he wanted, and we never really knew how to ask. That’s a quiet regret I carry. You don’t have to carry the same one.

If this piece meant something to you, please share it with someone who might need it: a sibling, a grown child, a friend whose parent is aging. And if you’ve had experience with a death doula, or wish you had, I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

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Neoliberalism Goes to Work

Neoliberalism has a few primary tenets that are easily identified and make it unique from libertarianism, objectivism and the “conservative” economic policies of the United States in the years prior to the neoliberal Reagan Revolution of 1981. They include beliefs that:

· Controlling inflation is the most important job of federal economic regulation and austerity (a lack of government participation in the lives of its people, particularly in any supportive way) is the best way to get there

· National economies must be deregulated because the market is smarter than government agencies or bureaucrats

· State-owned enterprises, from natural monopolies like city-run utilities and air-traffic control to schools and programs like Social Security and Medicare, must all be privatized; all “welfare” programs must end

· Governments must be shrunk radically, both to decrease their power and to “liberate” corporations and individuals of great wealth to work their “market magic”

· Taxes should be cut to the bone; if the “beast of government” can’t be shrunk, it must be starved

· Markets shouldn’t be centered in or favor any particular nation: the entire world is the “free market” stage on which corporations and morbidly rich capitalists must be free to work their magic

· Property rights are more important than human rights, and racial, religious or gender discrimination or their attendant economic inequalities are not problems to be solved by governments but by “free markets” and the people who dominate those marketplaces

Out of these core tenets come a group of corollaries which, while not often articulated publicly, are the plainly visible outcome of the rapid imposition of neoliberalism. We see these behavior patterns repeated whenever neoliberalism seizes a country, whether it be modest neoliberalism like in the US and UK or “shock neoliberalism” as was imposed in Chile, Iraq and Russia:

· Markets (capitalism) are superior to votes (democracy) so “all necessary steps” are justified to impose neoliberalism on “welfare state” democracies even when the majority of citizens oppose it

· While there can be barriers to the free movement of people between nations, there should be no barriers to the corporate “free trade” movement of goods or money

· Any involvement of government in the lives of its citizens outside of law enforcement and a defensive military inevitably leads to a loss of “freedom” for corporations and the very wealthy and therefore should be ended or privatized

· The family is the best metaphor for governance, with a strong male leader who can overcome the inevitable resistance of what Ayn Rand (who attended a later Mont Pelerin meeting) called “the moochers,” using clear lines of authority and long-established gender roles

· The “welfare state” must be ended; it’s inherently violent and coercive because it’s paid for by taxes taken by the threat of government violence (guns, jails) from well-off people and it also destroys “incentive to work” by providing for low-income people’s basic needs

· Even government functions as widely accepted as licensing physicians are inappropriate interventions in a “free market” (which is why Rand Paul created his very own ophthalmologic “board” to certify his unused medical license)

· Even fascism and oligarchy (as practiced in Chile and Russia on the advice of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” neoliberals who helped reorganize the economies of both countries) are acceptable alternatives to “welfare state democracy”

· Competition, not cooperation, is the defining characteristic of all truly important human interactions; winners should be celebrated and losers ignored

· Inequality is a sign that society is working as it should because the market rewards the most competent and punishes or leaves behind those not able or willing to carry their own weight

· “Citizenship” is secondary; the citizens of a country should instead be seen and treated as “consumers” because the economy is more critical than the state

· Monopolies are indicators of great efficiency in meeting the needs of the market and shouldn’t be feared or regulated

· Labor unions impede corporate management’s ability to make unilateral decisions and thus are antithetical to a freely functioning economy and a “free” nation

· Controlling inflation is more important than preventing unemployment

· Tax havens and other ways for wealthy people and corporations to avoid “paying their fair share” are an economic and social good because they simply reward hard work and innovation while denying resources to “the beast” of government

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Milton Friedman

The American among the Three Musketeers of neoliberalism was Milton Friedman, who taught for years at the Chicago School of Economics and has become a figure of cult worship on the economic and political right in America.

He was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater’s 1960 campaign for president, and a formal advisor to, among others, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Donald Rumsfeld (who he pushed Reagan to take on as his VP instead of GHW Bush in 1980).[xli]

Friedman was the functional theologian among the three; he absolutely believed that there was a near-mystical power to unregulated markets and that virtually any sort of governmental intervention in or regulation of the marketplace produced economic distortions that prevented capitalism from working its magic.

When, in his first inaugural address on January 20, 1981, President Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he was merely echoing Friedman.[xlii]

Twenty years earlier, Friedman had watched John F. Kennedy give his inaugural address and cringed when Kennedy hit his most memorable high point.

“In the long history of the world,” Kennedy said, “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility — I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”[xliii]

Kennedy’s speech sent Friedman into such a paroxysm of fury that he opened his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom by attacking it on page one.

“In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address,” Friedman writes in the opening paragraph of his book, “President Kennedy said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.’

“Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic ‘what your country can do for you’ implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, ‘what you can do for your country’ implies the government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary.”[xliv]

Friedman’s devotee Margaret Thatcher famously told Women’s Own magazine in 1987, “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”[xlv]

She got it from Friedman’s 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, whose next sentence after his anti-Kennedy rant was: “To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.”

If it sounds like they’re both echoing Jefferson in saying that a government should only function by “the consent of the governed,”[xlvi] they very much are not.

If the “governed” want a social safety net, for example, or want Social Security, a national health care system, or unemployment insurance then, both Friedman, Thatcher and today’s American Republican Party argue, that is something they should be denied because it will lead to communism (Mises/Friedman) or Naziism (Hayek).

Neoliberalism, instead, explicitly demands a “free market” system where all social needs are met by the magical marketplace and the morbidly rich who control it rather than by people banding together and taxing themselves to provide such benefits through government. No matter what percentage of the population likes those “free” things, they all lead, neoliberals will tell you, to bondage.

As Friedman wrote in the paragraph following his anti-Kennedy rant, “The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.”

Even the most kinds of basic government regulation that most people want will destroy “freedom,” Friedman argued, saying, for example, that even licensing doctors to practice medicine is a step too far.

In his chapter on Occupational Licensure, Friedman writes, “The medical profession is one in which practice of the profession has for a long time been restricted to people with licenses. Offhand, the question, ‘Ought we to let incompetent physicians practice?’ seems to admit of only a negative answer. But I want to urge that second thought may give pause.”

He then goes on to rant about how licensure isn’t about protecting the public but about greedy elites trying to keep “free people” from doing whatever they want while keeping the income for doctors high. This applies, Friedman says, for everything from plumbers’ unions to the AMA.

“The American Medical Association is perhaps the strongest trade union in the United States,” he writes. “The essence of the power of a trade union is its power to restrict the number who may engage in a particular occupation. This restriction may be exercised indirectly by being able to enforce a wage rate higher than would otherwise prevail. If such a wage rate can be enforced, it will reduce the number of people who can get jobs and thus indirectly the number of people pursuing the occupation. … the American Medical Association is in this position.”[xlvii]

And if there’s anything that Milton Friedman wanted to destroy it was trade unions and the government regulation that made it possible for them to legally withstand often-violent assaults from employers.

Along those same lines, in 1946 Friedman got into (metaphorical) bed with Herbert Nelson, “the chief lobbyist and executive vice president for the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and one of the highest paid lobbyists in the nation” and a co-founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), which invented the Libertarian Party as a political rationale to deregulate the real estate industry. [xlviii]

No fan of actual government, at least as understood by most Americans, Nelson famously said, “I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote. I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”[xlix]

Friedman co-wrote a booklet for Nelson’s FEE trashing the idea of rent controls titled Roofs and Ceilings. FEE had amassed a multi-million-dollar war chest, according to author Mark Ames, and while the amount Friedman was paid for his work (the FEE ordered a half-million copies printed) has never been disclosed, it represented Friedman’s entrée into the world of big business, which embraced him with vigor.

Friedman jumped right into the fray on behalf of big business, repeatedly arguing that when a corporation put social responsibility over profits it was engaged in the most wicked form of socialism. Regardless of the harm to the environment, workers, society or even democracy, any legal thing a corporation did to increase its profits was necessary to prevent collectivist communism from emerging in America.

As he wrote for the New York Times in 1970:

“[T]he doctrine of ‘social responsibility’ taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collective doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book Capitalism and Freedom, I have called it a ‘fundamentally subversive doctrine’ in a free society, and have said that in such a society, ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.’”[l]

Friedman also believed that because most citizens of developed countries liked their governments regulating things that affected their safety and providing them with a larger social safety net, it’s necessary to either use natural disasters or create crises to bring about the unpopular imposition of neoliberalism. As he wrote in the preface to the 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom:

“There is an enormous inertia – the tyranny of the status quo – in private and especially government arrangements. Only a crisis – actual or perceived – ​produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Thus was born what author Naomi Klein famously termed “The Shock Doctrine,” the title of her seminal and bestselling 2007 book,[li] laying out how giant corporations took advantage of a wide spectrum of crises, natural and man-made, to eliminate the socially protective functions of government and replace them with neoliberal rule by the rich and the corporate.

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Epilogue

Trump isn’t the first Republican president to have seized the White House by fraud. In fact, the historical pattern is far more disturbing: every Republican president since Eisenhower has either directly stolen the presidency or inherited their position from someone who did.

Nixon started this treasonous tradition in 1968. While President Johnson was desperately working to end the Vietnam War, Nixon secretly sent envoys to persuade South Vietnamese leaders to boycott peace talks, promising them better terms after his election. Johnson discovered this sabotage when the FBI brought him the wiretaps; he confronted Nixon directly, calling it what it was: “This is treason.”1 Nixon’s scheme worked, however, prolonging the war that killed an additional 22,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese. And Johnson took this crime to his grave; his library didn’t release the tapes for decades.

The pattern continued with Reagan in the election of 1980. As recently confirmed by former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes, Reagan’s campaign struck a deal with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to keep fifty-two American hostages captive until after the election, deliberately sabotaging President Carter’s negotiations for their release.2 The hostages were freed the very minute Reagan was sworn in, and his administration later secretly sold weapons to Iran (leading to the Iran-Contra scandal), thus keeping his corrupt bargain.

George H. W. Bush leveraged Reagan’s illegitimate presidency to get into the White House himself, and then used Attorney General Bill Barr to shut down the Iran-Contra investigation by pardoning six key figures before they could implicate him.3

The Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 by halting Florida’s recount, despite Gore winning the popular vote by over 500,000 ballots. A later investigation by major newspapers confirmed Gore would have won Florida under any fair counting standard.4 And let’s not forget that Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, purged at least 57,000 mostly Black voters from the rolls just months before the election that was “decided” by fewer than 600 votes.5

Trump continued this tradition in 2016, benefiting from voter suppression orchestrated by Republican secretaries of state and Kris Kobach’s Interstate Crosscheck program that purged millions of legitimate voters—mostly people of color—from the rolls.6 He also benefited from Russian interference through social media manipulation, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.7

Finally, Trump’s payment to silence Stormy Daniels—the crime that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg successfully prosecuted, leading to Trump’s thirty-four felony convictions for election fraud—was crucial to keeping Trump’s candidacy afloat after the “grab ’em by the pussy” scandal. Without those illegal payoffs violating campaign finance laws and keeping the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal stories under wraps, Trump almost certainly would have lost to Hillary Clinton.

America has ignored GOP crimes to seize the White House for far too long. Ford’s pardon of Nixon set a destructive precedent of presidential immunity that has echoed through decades, leading to packed courts, unnecessary wars, massive tax cuts for billionaires, and the gutting of America’s middle class.

And now it’s been amplified by six Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that Trump can commit crimes while in office with relative impunity, an immunity that he’s apparently reveling in.

It’s time to break this pattern and finally hold at least one (convicted) criminal Republican president accountable.

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Hope Is a Discipline

In dark times, hope isn’t a passive emotion: it’s a discipline, a practice we must cultivate daily through action and solidarity, a discipline that keeps us moving forward no matter how hard things get. It keeps us grounded and focused on a positive future.

Mariame Kaba, the prison abolitionist and organizer, puts it perfectly: “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline. . . . we have to practice it every single day.”26

Given that the enemies of democracy and advocates of authoritarianism are massively well-funded, have been liberated by Republicans on the Supreme Court, and control a large part of our media and social media infrastructure, the path forward won’t be easy. There will be setbacks, moments of despair, and very real dangers. But if history tells us anything, it’s that people facing far worse odds have repeatedly and successfully defended or even brought into being (as our Founders did) democracy against authoritarian threats. If South Koreans could defend their democracy against corruption, if Chileans could end Pinochet’s brutal regime, if South Africans could dismantle apartheid, if America could prevail against the fascists of the Confederacy, then we modern Americans can certainly protect our democratic institutions.

In the famous words of anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

The question isn’t whether we can defeat authoritarianism: history both proves that we repeatedly have and that, going forward, we can. The question is whether we will, like our forebearers, again muster the courage, wisdom, and solidarity to do so.

Democracy isn’t just a system of government: it’s a moral commitment to human dignity, equality, and freedom handed down to us by Indigenous people (as I detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy), preserved by generations of Americans willing to fight and die for it. Its defense isn’t just political; it’s profoundly personal and the work that today falls to you and me. Thus, each of us must decide what role we’ll play in this defining struggle of our time.

As you close this book, I hope you’ll carry not just an understanding of the threat we face, but a deepened commitment to the values of democracy that are so worth fighting for, along with a renewed and practical knowledge of how to join that fight effectively.

The future isn’t yet written. It’s created, day by day, via our collective choices. This is why it’s so imperative that each of us make choices that our grandchildren will thank us for.

The billionaire authoritarians and their toadies believe their hour has come. Let’s prove them wrong.

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Remember: The Cost of Forgetting

History shows us that societies that fail to honestly confront (and teach their children about) their darkest chapters are, more often than not, doomed to repeat them. Germany’s unflinching confrontation with its Nazi past—through education, memorials, and legal accountability—stands in stark contrast to Japan’s reluctance to fully acknowledge its wartime atrocities, or to America’s halting efforts to address our legacy of slavery (and the ongoing “Lost Cause” Confederate mythos) as well as the (ongoing) genocide against this continent’s Indigenous peoples.

The consequences of this collective amnesia are all around us, from the Confederate flags on January 6th to the new efforts to strip science and history from our schools. When we fail to teach children about the horrors of the Holocaust, for example, anti-Semitism resurges. When we allow Confederate monuments to stand unchallenged, white nationalism finds fertile ground. When we call January 6th “legitimate political discourse” (as multiple Republican elected officials have done) rather than the attempted coup that it was, we prepare the soil for the next, potentially successful insurrection.

Memory is not passive; it’s an active, ongoing process, because it’s the foundation of our present and shapes our future. As philosopher George Santayana famously noted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”23 But just remembering isn’t enough: we must draw the right lessons, form the true conclusions, and pass along the honest truths to our children from history.

The most dangerous form of forgetting isn’t complete amnesia, it’s sanitization, where historical atrocities are stripped of their horror and repackaged as noble struggles (as is being done today and has been done for over a century around the Civil War) or unfortunate mistakes (like the way we deal with the lies that led us into Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan). We see this in “conservative” attempts to rebrand the Confederacy as a fight for “states’ rights” rather than to preserve slavery, or in textbooks, stories, and even movies and TV shows (remember the westerns of the mid-twentieth century?) that minimize the genocide of Native Americans as an “unfortunate” consequence of “westward expansion.”

I remember well back in the 1980s when we’d moved to Atlanta from New Hampshire, our first time living in the South. Over dinner one night I asked our son, then in public elementary school, what he’d studied in school that day. “We learned about the War of Northern Aggression,” he told Louise and me to our slack-jawed amazement.

This selective amnesia and its promotion across our nation’s social and political culture isn’t accidental. It’s a deliberate strategy by the beneficiaries of white supremacy and genocide to avoid accountability and perpetuate the systems that help them retain their own power. As journalist Jelani Cobb notes, “When we speak of history, we’re not speaking about what happened in the past. We’re talking about who has the power to define what happened.”24

Authoritarian movements understand this power all too well. Their first target is almost always historical truth, banning books, removing “uncomfortable” topics from school curricula, and attacking archives and academic freedom. The world saw it in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Japan in the run-up to World War II, and is seeing it now in Russia, Hungary, and—tragically—here in the United States. They know that controlling the past is essential to controlling the future. As Hitler wrote in Chapter 10 of Mein Kampf, “The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,” and as he later said in a 1935 speech at the Reichsparteitag, “He alone, who owns the youth, also seizes the future.”

Resisting this erasure requires commitment to what I learned when I lived there in the 1980s, what modern-day Germans call Erinnerungskultur: a “culture of remembrance” that actively preserves memory of historical crimes and treats them not as ancient history but as living warnings. This includes

· Creating and preserving memorials to historical atrocities

· Supporting honest education about our darkest chapters

· Recording and amplifying the testimonies of survivors and witnesses

· Establishing truth and reconciliation processes

· Holding perpetrators accountable regardless of time elapsed

As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel reminded us, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”25 And we must bear that witness not to wallow in guilt, but to make absolutely sure that “never again” is a lived reality instead of just an empty slogan.

The American experiment has always been, at multiple levels, a contradiction: founded on principles of freedom while practicing slavery, promising equality while enforcing segregation, celebrating democracy while denying the vote to millions. But what has kept our American experiment—the first in the history of the civilized world—alive is our willingness, however halting and imperfect, to confront these contradictions and nonetheless (or even because of them) strive toward that more perfect union that our Constitution’s preamble promises.

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The AI Authoritarian Threat

Pope Leo XIV labeled AI one of the main threats facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to human dignity, justice, and labor.21 He’s right, but it’s even worse than that; AI represents, unless it’s rigorously regulated, a threat to democracy itself.

In every generation, the enemies of democracy change costumes, nations, and languages, but their playbook remains eerily familiar. They lie, divide, intimidate, and exploit every available tool to consolidate power. In the 1930s they used newspapers and radio, in the 2010s it was social media, and now, in 2025, the newest and most dangerous weapon in the authoritarian arsenal is artificial intelligence.

Make no mistake: AI isn’t just another “new technology.” It’s power, scaled. And in the hands of the hard right that is trying to end our republican form of government, it has the potential to become the most effective tool for dismantling democracy ever invented.22

Authoritarians—whether MAGA-aligned in the United States or part of the global movement that includes Putin, Orbán, Modi, MBS, and others—­are not blind to the potential of AI. They understand it instinctively: its ability to pretend to be human, to deceive, to surveil, and to dominate. While progressives and democratic institutions are scrambling to get a handle on its implications, authoritarians in America, Russia, and around the world have already started weaponizing it with devastating efficiency.

A single AI machine can now generate millions of personalized political messages in seconds, each calibrated to manipulate voters’ specific fears or biases. It can (and currently is being used to) create entire fake news outlets, populate them with AI-generated journalists, and flood your social feed or web search with content that looks real, sounds real, and feels familiar, all without a single human behind it. Imagine the power of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machine, but with superintelligence behind the wheel and zero friction. That’s where we’re heading in the 2028 presidential election.

And that’s just the beginning.

Authoritarian regimes can—and already are—using AI to surveil and intimidate their citizens. What China has perfected with facial recognition, social media, and loyalty scoring, MAGA-aligned figures in the United States are rushing to adopt and adapt. Right-wing sheriffs and local governments could soon use AI to track protesters, compile digital dossiers, and “predict” criminal behavior in communities deemed politically undesirable. If the government knows not just where you are, but what you’re thinking, organizing, or reading—­and it can fabricate “evidence” to match—freedom of thought (much less freedom of expression) becomes a quaint memory.

This isn’t theoretical. In 2024, Republicans deployed AI-generated robocalls impersonating Joe Biden telling voters to stay home, and millions did. In the next cycle, it’s safe to predict that we’ll see entire portions of election campaigns waged by AI bots masquerading as voters, influencers, news media, and even public officials.

The goal here for the hard right that doesn’t embrace democracy but wants America to become an authoritarian state isn’t just to win; it’s to delegitimize the democratic process itself as Orbán and Putin have done. Because once trust is broken—once people believe that “both sides lie” or that “you can’t believe anything anymore”—then, inevitably (history tells us), strongmen step into the void with promises of order, purity, and salvation.

And when they do, AI will also be there to help them enforce the new “order” in their “orderly society” where dissent has become a crime and fear of speaking out stalks the land.

Imagine a future where police departments outsource their decision-­making to “neutral” algorithms, algorithms coded with the biases of their creators, like Musk is doing by training his Grok AI on X. Where AI-driven court systems deny permits, benefits, or even due process based on Majority Report–style “behavioral profiles.” Where (like in China today) loyalty to the regime is rewarded with access, and dissent is flagged by invisible systems you can’t appeal or even know about for sure.

That’s not democracy. That’s techno-feudalism, wrapped in a red-white-and-blue flag.

If we allow the billionaires who fund the hard right to continue merging political power with unregulated AI, we will see the rise of a system where freedom is algorithmically rationed.

Elections will still happen, of course, but outcomes will be predetermined without our even realizing it. Dissent will still exist, but only in controlled pockets, and it’ll be easy to monitor and suppress through harassment, intimidation, and arrest. History books will be written, edited, and distributed by AI code optimized to tell the oligarch’s story while suppressing the true stories of America (particularly those of racial and gender minorities). In this Brave New America, the “news” will be whatever the regime’s AI decides you should see.

This is not science fiction. It is the logical endpoint of unregulated, authoritarian-aligned artificial intelligence in the hands of unaccountable billionaires and despotic governments.

So what can we do?

To start, we must treat the regulation of AI and the people who own/use/deploy it as a democratic survival issue. That means

· Banning the use of deepfakes in political ads

· Enforcing transparency on algorithmic decision-making

· Creating public, open-source alternatives to corporate-controlled models

· Creating disinformation-catching infrastructure as we would biological or nuclear weapons (that are also not just dangerous, but potentially civilization-ending)

· Demanding that social media outlets publish their algorithms so we can see how we’re being manipulated

And we must do it now.

Because history teaches us that once authoritarianism takes root, it rarely gives up power voluntarily. Particularly when (like with the innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) it has new tools that are more powerful than those who would protest and try to defend democracy. The longer we wait, the more embedded, autonomous, and intelligent these systems will become, and the more wealth and power their owners will accumulate. We’re not just fighting bad actors anymore; we’re fighting machines trained by them to think and behave like them.

The battle for democracy in the age of AI won’t be won with slogans or optimism alone. It will take law, oversight, courage, and above all, vigilance. I end every radio show with “democracy is not a spectator sport.” If we want to preserve the sacred right of self-governance we inherited from previous generations, we have no choice but to immediately recognize the existential threat in front of us and act with appropriate urgency.

This time, the fight isn’t just against the usual suspects.

This time, the algorithm is watching.

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Reform: It Wasn’t Just Trump—It Was the System That Fed Him

Donald Trump didn’t emerge from a vacuum. He’s the product of systems—­corrupt, corroded, and increasingly anti-democratic, yes, but systems nonetheless—­that made his rise not just possible but inevitable. If we only focus on removing Trump without addressing the deep corruption of Citizens United and other events and systems that produced him, we’re simply setting the stage for the next authoritarian, who may be smarter, more disciplined, and ultimately more dangerous.

As a result, the deep question that our media almost never mentions is this: can democracy survive when it’s for sale?

Our campaign finance system has effectively legalized bribery through the Supreme Court’s disastrous all-Republican-appointee 5–4 Citizens United decision, which unleashed unlimited corporate and billionaire spending in lobbying and across our elections. As Justice John Paul Stevens warned in his dissent, the court’s ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation.”11 That prophecy came true with frightening speed as, post-2010, campaign spending exploded.

Billionaires have pumped fortunes into creating an infrastructure that supports authoritarianism, from think tanks that draft corporate-friendly policies, to well-paid media stars and outlets that spread lies and disinformation, to dark money groups that fund right-wing extremist candidates and initiatives.12 These oligarchs and their corporations aren’t investing out of patriotism (although that’s always their claim); they expect returns in the form of tax cuts, deregulation, and policies that increase their wealth and power while attacking dissent and gutting the power of government, workers, and unions.

The result is a political system that only responds to the GOP’s donor class and is openly hostile to the needs of ordinary Americans. As researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated in their landmark study, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”13

I’ve been running a contest on my radio show for twenty-two years: the winner will identify any one piece of legislation since the 1980 Reagan Revolution that was written by Republicans, passed Congress with a majority of Republican votes, and was signed into law by a Republican president that primarily benefits average working people or the poor instead of corporations or the rich. Nobody has ever won the autographed book I’m offering as a prize.

This system of legalized corruption reaches far beyond mere campaign contributions (although it’s massive there). The revolving door between government and industry lets legislators and bureaucrats who write regulations “fail upward” to extremely well-paid jobs in the industries they once regulated. The growth of this Supreme Court–certified lobbying industry—which now spends over $3.7 billion annually—guarantees that corporate interests are dominant in every policy debate, while people advocating for the public interest are vastly outgunned.14

Media consolidation has compounded these problems. In 1983, fifty companies controlled most of America’s media outlets. Today, just six corporations—­several explicitly right-leaning—control 90 percent of what Americans see, hear, and read.15 This concentration hasn’t just kneecapped journalistic independence; it’s invented “news” designed to maximize profit rather than inform citizens. The result is that facts have become optional, conspiracy theories flourish, and outrage drives decisions made in media boardrooms and editorial production meetings.

Our judiciary, meant by the Framers as, in part, a check on the president’s political power, has instead become a partisan weapon. The billionaire- and corporate-funded Federalist Society has transformed a good number of our federal courts into bastions of pro-corporate, anti-worker jurisprudence. Right-wing judges have gutted voting rights, stripped us of labor protections, and shielded the morbidly rich from accountability, all while spouting bogus, pious claims that they’re merely “originalists” and simply mind-reading the Framers—who were as disparate a group as any you could find today—as they pretend to “interpret” the Constitution.16

When Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, he wasn’t just making routine appointments like most presidents before him who depended on the American Bar Association for guidance; instead, he and Mitch McConnell were completing a decades-long project to capture our nation’s judiciary on behalf of corporations, the rich, and the ideologues of the authoritarian right. These aren’t Trump’s judges, as they’ll long outlive him; they are, instead—since Trump stopped giving the ABA advance notice of nominations in 2017—the billionaire-funded Federalist Society’s judges, vetted and approved by the same dark money networks that have systematically dismantled so many of our democratic guardrails.17

Reforming this system isn’t about winning the next election; it’s about ending our drift toward fascism and returning to the democratic principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This work we’re undertaking requires undoing years of democratic backsliding with fundamental structural changes to revive our democracy. We must

· Overturn Citizens United through constitutional amendment or court reform (or both), ending the fiction that money equals speech and corporations have the same Constitutional rights as people.

· Implement public financing of elections to ensure candidates respond to voters, not donors. Seattle’s “democracy voucher” program offers a promising model, where each voter receives four vouchers worth twenty-five dollars each that they can donate to candidates who agree to lower contribution limits.18

· Break up media monopolies to restore the vibrant, diverse, and independent press that we once enjoyed and democracy requires. In particular, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which enabled massive media consolidation and let social media sites turn into unregulated propaganda mills, must be replaced with legislation that promotes local ownership, social media responsibility, and journalistic independence.19

· Require algorithmic transparency in social media by reforming or killing off Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act so people can see for themselves exactly how they’re being influenced and by whom.

· Reform the Supreme Court through term limits, enforceable ethical standards, and potentially expansion, restoring its role as a neutral arbiter rather than a partisan weapon.

· Strengthen anti-corruption laws to close the revolving door between government and industry while limiting the influence of big, dark money in lobbying.

These reforms aren’t partisan. They’re pro-democracy. And they’re essential if we want to prevent the next Trump, who will almost certainly be far more effective at dismantling our democratic institutions than Donald, JD, and Elon have been.

The choice before us isn’t between left and right but between democracy and authoritarianism. As the famous conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig recently warned, “America is at war with itself over our democracy” and facing “the most perilous moment for our democracy since the founding of the United States.”20

Democracy can’t survive when it’s for sale to the highest bidder. These reforms aren’t optional; they’re existential.

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Chapter 14: Reform, Resist, and Remember

Resist: How We Defeat Authoritarianism

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, it seemed like every liberal and progressive friend I knew was either talking about moving to Canada or stocking up on canned goods, ready to hunker down for the inevitable descent into authoritarianism.

I get it. After reading the previous chapters of this book, you might feel a sense of hopelessness. The path toward autocracy sometimes seems inevitable because we’ve all seen the pattern repeated in countries that have already fallen. The machinery of oligarchy and autocracy is well-oiled, the morbidly rich are already largely in charge, the courts are captured, the media is under assault, and truth itself—particularly in the increasingly popular right-wing media and on billionaire-owned social media—is more often than not optional.

But here’s our mantra: authoritarianism is not our destiny. Once we realize what’s going on, it becomes a choice, and we can choose to reject it.

These aren’t empty platitudes or wishful thinking. History shows us that authoritarians are often defeated. Fascists can be stopped from within. Democracy, though imperfect, can revive itself even after periods of right-wing darkness.

Consider the examples of South Korea in 2016–2017 and again in 2024. When President Park Geun-hye’s corruption scandal broke in 2016, millions of Koreans took to the streets in peaceful protest. For months, citizens held weekly candlelight demonstrations that drew people from all walks of life. Those protests led directly to Park’s impeachment, removal from office, and later imprisonment. There was a similar reclaiming of democracy when, in 2024, President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to make himself a dictator with state-of-emergency and martial law declarations. Like Park, Yoon was jailed and impeached and democracy has now returned to South Korea.1

Or look at Chile. After seventeen years of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (installed by Nixon and Kissinger with the help of four American corporations), Chileans organized, mobilized, and ultimately voted him out in a 1988 referendum that he himself had arranged, confident he would win. They defeated him with something as simple as hope, embodied in their campaign slogan “La alegría ya viene” (“Joy is coming”).2

Similarly, in 2022, Sri Lankans from all walks of life—crossing previously unbridgeable ethnic and religious divides—united in peaceful protest to force out the corrupt and authoritarian Rajapaksa dynasty that then ruled their country with an iron fist.3

These aren’t isolated examples. They’re part of a pattern across history: ordinary people, fighting together with strategic focus and moral clarity, can and often do defeat authoritarians.

Understanding the Authoritarian Playbook

To defeat authoritarians, we must first understand their methodology. Their playbook is remarkably consistent across countries and eras:

· Divide the population into “real” citizens versus “enemies of the people.”

· Attack independent media as “fake news.” Corrupt the judiciary to serve power rather than justice.

· Capture electoral systems to ensure they can never lose.

· Militarize law enforcement to protect the regime, not the public.

· Rewrite history to create myths that support their power.

· Use economic anxiety to justify targeting vulnerable groups.

· Co-opt religious and patriotic symbols to present opposition as treason.

This playbook has been deployed in Russia under Putin, Hungary under Orbán, Turkey under Erdoƒüan, Brazil under Bolsonaro, and the Philippines under Duterte, among others throughout the history of the past century.4 And, eerily, these steps are precisely the strategy Trump and his allies tried during his first term and are now pursuing in his second.

But here’s the good news: because the authoritarian playbook is generally consistent, the strategies and methods to fight back can be as well. Successful resistance to authoritarianism, like authoritarianism itself, usually follows patterns we can learn from and appropriate for our own use.

Building the Resistance: Seven Strategies That Work

Looking at the history of successful anti-authoritarian movements around the world, here are seven proven strategies I’ve identified that can help us protect and revive what’s left of our own democracy:

1. Unite across Traditional Divides

Authoritarians often win when they successfully divide the opposition, like Trump is trying to do by getting Americans to hate on their queer, brown-skinned, and well-educated “liberal” neighbors. The most effective resistance movements overcome these kinds of traditional political, ethnic, and social divisions by forming democracy-focused coalitions.

In Poland, as Louise and I learned when we visited in 2024, when the hard-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) attempted to capture the judiciary and media, average people across ideological lines from left to right rose up and fought back. Civil society groups that had historically disagreed on policy set aside differences to defend what was left of their democracy. And it worked. As our guide in Gdansk proudly told us (he’d participated in the street protests and even endured gunfire), that coalition ended eight years of authoritarian PiS rule in 2023.5

And there are signs the same is happening here. Progressives and traditional conservatives are finding common cause in defending democratic norms and institutions as we see with the Lincoln Project and other efforts, embracing the ideals our Founders fought and died for in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Urban and rural voters are increasingly coming together as we have seen in the regular anti-Trump, anti-fascism demonstrations that have shown up in virtually every town and city in America. All we have to do is set aside our policy differences so we can together preserve the system that makes possible the eventual policy debates we’ll revisit when full democracy is restored.

2. Protect Truth and Information Ecosystems

Authoritarians succeed, as George Orwell pointed out in 1984, when truth is subjective and facts are controlled by the state. Thus, Trump’s power, to a surprising extent, depends on his ability to control information and undermine independent sources of truth. This, of course, is why wannabe dictators always go after media early on.

Today, with right-wing-biased social media algorithms driving hate, polarization, and disinformation to hold eyeballs and increase profits, protecting truth requires both individual and systemic approaches:

· Support independent local journalism through subscriptions and donations.

· Promote media literacy in schools and communities (Finland has pioneered this).

· Create cross-partisan fact-checking organizations and websites that transcend political divides.

· Require transparency of social media algorithms that today profit from division and falsehood.

· Build and elevate media outlets that promote accuracy over eyeballs.

As philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, “Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed.”6

3. Defend and Reform Democratic Institutions

Institutions can’t defend themselves: people like you and me must defend our institutions. And to be worth defending, those institutions must serve the people.

For Americans, this means

· Organizing to protect voting rights at both state and federal levels

· Strengthening anti-corruption measures across all branches of government

· Modernizing the Electoral Count Act to prevent future attempts to overturn elections

· Rebalancing power between branches to limit executive overreach

As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.”7

4. Practice Strategic Nonviolence

Nonviolent resistance isn’t just morally superior to violence, it’s also more effective: just ask the followers of Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Research by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan has proven that nonviolent campaigns are more than twice as likely to succeed as violent ones.8

Nonviolent resistance works because it

· Allows broader participation across demographic groups

· Makes it harder for authorities to justify repression

· Causes security forces to question their loyalty to the regime

· Generates greater international support

· Builds stronger democratic foundations for the future

And don’t misunderstand: nonviolence doesn’t call for passive acceptance of authoritarian actions; far from it. Strategic nonviolence includes strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, disruption of normal life, direct confrontations with authority figures like ICE, and other forms of direct action that impose real costs on authoritarian regimes.

As civil rights leader Bayard Rustin observed, “The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.”9

5. Build Alternative Power Structures

Successful resistance movements don’t just protest; they demonstrate the future by building better models of governance and making communities more resilient against authoritarian control.

For Americans facing incipient fascism, this means

· Strengthening local groups that directly address community needs

· Building worker cooperatives that model small-d democratic economics

· Creating community media including websites, podcasts, and low-power FM stations that provide reliable local information

· Participating in local government in ways that increase participation and transparency

· Supporting faith communities and civic organizations that become local centers and thus foster social cohesion

· Fielding a “shadow cabinet” filled with Democrats and Republicans who are committed to democracy and positive governance

These structures serve two crucial functions: they meet immediate needs, making resistance sustainable, and they prefigure the democratic society we’re fighting to both preserve and create.

6. Engage Internationally

Authoritarianism is both an ancient and a global phenomenon, which is why resistance movements must be global as well. Successful efforts build international connections that provide support, resources, and can offer protection or even places to flee if necessary.

For Americans, international engagement means

· Building solidarity with democracy movements worldwide

· Learning from successful resistance strategies throughout history and in other countries

· Creating transnational efforts to regulate global platforms like social media

· Supporting international institutions that uphold democratic norms, from the UN to the International Criminal Court

The United States has often positioned itself as democracy’s defender across the world. Now, ironically, Americans need to learn from democratic defenders in our own history and elsewhere.

7. Prepare for the Long Struggle

One of the most important lessons from successful resistance movements throughout history is that defeating authoritarianism is not a one-off, single-­event victory but a long-term process requiring sustained sacrifice and persistence.

South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle lasted decades. Poland’s Solidarity movement faced years of setbacks, including martial law, before achieving democracy. Chilean resistance to Pinochet suffered seventeen years of brutal repression before his removal.

Now that Trump and his allies are entrenched in our governmental, political, media, and economic systems, Americans must prepare for a marathon, not a sprint. This means

· Developing sustainable activism practices and communities that prevent burnout

· Creating intergenerational movements that pass knowledge to younger activists

· Building infrastructure for long-term organizing beyond election cycles

· Celebrating small victories to maintain morale during difficult periods

· Articulating a positive vision that sustains hope through dark times

As Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote during his country’s darkest period: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”10

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Chapter 13: The Empathy Deficit

Democracy’s Essential Ingredient

In January, as another brutal Maine winter gripped the Northeast, Dwayne LaBrecque faced an impossible choice. The diabetic father of five, who’d lost several toes and part of his foot to infection, stared at his most recent heating bill with a growing dread. After losing his job as a shipping manager, Dwayne’s income had collapsed.1

For years, he’d relied on LIHEAP—the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program created by Congress in 1981—to keep his family warm through Maine’s harsh winters. But soon after his inauguration, Trump and congressional Republicans had put LIHEAP on the chopping block.

“If the president turned around and did away with that funding,” Dwayne told a local reporter, his voice breaking, “I have no idea how we’d survive the winter.”

His story isn’t at all unique. Across America, literally millions of families face similar crises every year, from heat to food to housing to medical and school bills, as the Trump administration dismantles the safety net that has protected vulnerable Americans for generations. But what strikes me most isn’t just the policy change; it’s the profound empathy deficit that enables it.

During my years rostered as a psychotherapist back in the 1980s, I learned that there’s a subset of humanity—roughly 1.5 to 4 percent of the general population—who lack the neurological or psychological ability to experience empathy. These individuals, often described clinically as sociopaths or psychopaths, process others’ pain in a purely intellectual way. They recognize suffering but feel little to nothing in response. No emotional twinge, no discomfort, no moral imperative to help.

While they represent a small fraction of the general population, they account for about one-third of our prison populations, commit roughly 90 percent of America’s violent crimes, and—most relevant to our current situation—are approximately 21 percent of all corporate CEOs.2 This last statistic helps explain how the American government, with big money from these CEOs following Lewis Powell’s infamous 1971 memo, has been transformed from an institution dedicated to the common good into something that increasingly resembles a corporate boardroom where human suffering is just an externality to be managed.

This mindset has now infected our entire system of government. It’s why Trump gleefully kept Kilmar Abrego Garcia in an El Salvadoran concentration camp even in defiance of a Supreme Court order to release him. It’s why he and his Project 2025 architects dismantled programs that helped vulnerable Americans without a twinge of conscience.3 It’s why his administration can watch climate disasters devastate communities while simultaneously rolling back environmental protections and gutting FEMA. This isn’t just partisan policy disagreement; it’s an empathy deficit elevated to governing philosophy.

This lack of empathy gets philosophical backing from figures like Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, both favorites among Republicans and Libertarians who view compassion as weakness. Nietzsche famously called pity “a waste of feeling, a moral parasite which is injurious to the health,” while Rand built an entire philosophy around the “virtue of selfishness.” It’s no coincidence that billionaires like Elon Musk—who recently called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization”—find these ideas attractive. They provide intellectual cover for what is, at root, a profound moral failing.

Yet empathy isn’t a flaw; it’s the cornerstone of civilization itself. It’s the foundation upon which our democratic experiment was built. The Framers understood this, which is why both the preamble and Article I of our Constitution mention the “General Welfare.” Alexander Hamilton noted that “common interest may always be reckoned upon as the surest bond of sympathy.” Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both emphasized that government must serve more than just the powerful.

As I detailed in The Hidden History of American Democracy, concern for every community member is what led tribal people around the world to create largely egalitarian political structures throughout prehistory, structures on which we based our own Constitution. Margaret Mead noted this, pointing out how the evidence of healed bones was a surefire sign that prehistoric people didn’t leave their injured members to die but nurtured them back to health, even though the time and effort may have represented a risk to the tribe. Empathy built America and has guided our progress, in fits and starts but nonetheless generation by generation, toward a “more perfect union.”

When this essential quality of empathy vanishes from governance, democracy itself begins to collapse. A nation without empathy isn’t really a nation at all; it’s just a crime syndicate with a flag and army, a conspiracy to use the powers of government—the only institution that can legally deprive us of our freedom or even our lives—to elevate the powerful while crushing the weak. This ultimate expression of governmental sociopathy is called fascism, oligarchy, or authoritarianism. But whatever the label, the substance remains the same: rule by those who view human suffering as abstract and simply an acceptable price to be paid for wealth and power.

This is precisely what we’re witnessing now. As Trump implements Project 2025’s blueprint for dismantling the administrative state, each policy change reflects not just different priorities from America’s historic values, but a fundamentally different conception of what government itself is for. Instead of an institution that protects the vulnerable and promotes the general welfare, Trump views our government as a weapon to reward friends, punish enemies, and enrich the already wealthy, a machine of sorts for transforming public resources into private gain.

Dwayne LaBrecque feels this transformation most acutely. For him, LIHEAP wasn’t an abstract budget line; it was the difference between his family sleeping in warmth or shivering through another Maine winter. But in an administration where empathy is viewed as weakness, Dwayne’s suffering simply doesn’t matter.

Why It Matters

This is the deepest danger of Trump’s second term. Beyond specific policies, beyond institutional damage, he shows us what it looks like when sociopathy becomes a governing philosophy, a view of politics where the vulnerable aren’t citizens deserving protection but “useless eaters.”

Democracy can’t survive this sort of empathy deficit, as Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out when he said, “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

But as we’ll explore in the next chapter, this isn’t inevitable. Resistance remains possible. Reform is achievable. The democratic ideal of our Founders and most presidents since that time—a government of, by, and for the people—still lives in the hearts of millions of Americans who refuse to accept a nation without empathy.

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Chapter 12: The Nightmare Scenario

Louise and I watched on MSNBC as President Trump, on April 9, 2025, signed executive orders targeting two former officials who dared to defy him during his first term.

“I think he’s guilty of treason, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said as he signed an order stripping security clearances from Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security official who had written critically about the Trump administration under the pen name “Anonymous” in 2019.1

Next came an order targeting Christopher Krebs, whom Trump had fired by tweet in November 2020 when, as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, now gutted by Musk), Krebs had declared the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and refuted Trump’s claims of fraud. In an act of pure malice, in April 2025 Trump stripped Krebs of his access to the Global Entry system that lets people speed through Customs when entering the United States.2

But these orders went far beyond those two men. The presidential memoranda also suspended clearances for any individuals associated with them including employees at SentinelOne, the cybersecurity company where Krebs worked, and personnel at the University of Pennsylvania, where Taylor had served as a lecturer.3

As Trump called Krebs a “wise guy” and a “fraud,” Louise turned to me with the same look of dismay I’d seen on January 6th four years earlier.

“This is only the beginning, isn’t it?” she asked.

I nodded grimly. This wasn’t just about Trump settling scores: when vengeance drives policy, democracy doesn’t just weaken; it can die.

“I Am Your Retribution”

People often asked me on my radio show in the months leading up to November 2024: “What’s the worst-case scenario if Trump wins again?” That question is now, of course, moot. The worst-case scenario so many of us feared is unfolding in front of our eyes.

That sounds hyperbolic, I know. Americans have a hard time imagining that our system could fundamentally break. We’ve survived a Canadian/British invasion, a Civil War, two World Wars, the Republican Great Depression, and countless other crises with our constitutional framework intact. Surely, people say, we can survive one man.

But Trump isn’t just any man: he’s uniquely dangerous in American history. Unlike previous presidents who at least felt constrained by democratic norms, Trump—as we saw in Chapter 3—has built his entire identity on the performance of success rather than its substance. His presidency isn’t about governance but about maintaining the illusion of winning at all costs.

And as we explored in Chapter 2, Roy Cohn taught him that institutions exist not to serve the public but to be weaponized against enemies. Trump combines these lessons with a complete immunity to shame that makes traditional accountability impossible.

This is the pattern constitutional scholars like Kim Lane Scheppele have documented in countries where democracy has been destroyed by elected leaders who quickly became autocrats. “Modern autocracy comes through legal means,” explains Scheppele, who studied Hungary’s constitutional decline under Orbán. “Democratic institutions are hollowed out from within while maintaining a democratic façade.”4

Trump’s first term was just the dress rehearsal, a testing of boundaries, a probing of weaknesses. He was learning. His current term is now the main performance: systematic, strategic, and utterly transformational. Unlike other presidents who grew into the office, Trump—shaped by the Queens upbringing we examined in Chapter 1—sees governance solely through the lens of domination. He told us exactly what he planned to do. Now he’s doing it.

“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump thundered at CPAC in March 2023. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”5

That wasn’t just campaign rhetoric. It was a mission statement from a man who, as we’ve established, views every relationship as transactional and every institution as a potential weapon. Now, in his second presidency, he has fewer constraints than ever before.

No More Adults in the Room

During Trump’s first term, his most dangerous impulses were usually thwarted by staff who quietly ignored orders, slow-walked directives, or even leaked plans to the press. We know this not from conspiracy theories or news reports but from the people who were there.

General Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told associates after the 2020 election, “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed” in using the military to stay in power.6 Chief of Staff John Kelly, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and others formed what anonymous officials called a “guardrail” around the president.

In his current term, those guardrails have been systematically dismantled, including the mass decapitation of senior levels of our military.

In April 2023, Trump’s inner circle helped draft a 920-page manifesto called “Project 2025,” published by the Heritage Foundation but crafted by dozens of former Trump officials. This document, billed as a “mandate for leadership,” provided a step-by-step plan for consolidating power and neutralizing opposition that Trump is now implementing.7

The endgame isn’t policy. It’s power: unchecked, unaccountable, and wielded for personal gain and vendetta.

The Department of Retribution

The Justice Department was the first institution Trump transformed during his current term.

He’d made no secret of his intentions: He repeatedly promised to use the DOJ against his enemies, calling for the prosecution of those who investigated him. “They should be prosecuted for what they’ve done,” he said of Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. “They’ve violated the Constitution. . . . they’re trying to interfere with an election.”8

Project 2025 called for removing independence from the Justice Department and placing it directly under presidential control.9 The goal? To institutionalize this corrupt vision. And, sure enough, in Trump’s second term the DOJ has been weaponized. We are seeing:

· Prosecutors who investigated Trump facing retaliatory investigations

· Witnesses who testified against Trump losing security clearances, as exemplified by the April 9, 2025, executive orders

· January 6th insurrectionists receiving pardons while peaceful protesters and students who write op-eds face federal charges

· Critics like Krebs and Taylor targeted for official punishment, with their colleagues and associates also penalized10

This isn’t speculation; it’s what’s happening right now. Trump’s April 9th executive orders targeting Krebs and Taylor were the opening salvos of a broader campaign that we can expect to last—and get progressively more aggressive—for his entire four years.11

The End of Free Elections

Trump’s most dangerous fixation isn’t on personal enemies: it’s on the electoral system itself.

After all, Trump’s greatest grievance isn’t that he lost in 2020. It’s that he was stopped from overturning the results. He promised that next time, he wouldn’t be. Now, in his current term, he’s making good on that promise.

The infrastructure for election subversion has been under construction for years. Since 2021, Republican state legislatures have passed dozens of laws restricting voting access, particularly in methods and communities that tend to vote Democratic. But more ominously, many of these laws also change who counts the votes, replacing independent election officials with partisan appointees willing to overturn results.12

In Trump’s current term

· Election rules are being rewritten to favor Republican voters and suppress Democratic ones.

· The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has been neutered, eliminating federal protection for voting rights.

· State legislatures are being encouraged to override popular votes if they don’t like the results.

· Voter roll purges, gerrymandering, and ID restrictions have exploded, particularly in Republican-controlled swing states.

· Election officials who resist are being replaced with those willing to “find votes” when needed.

The Voting Rights Act—already weakened repeatedly by Republicans on the Supreme Court—is being further gutted through DOJ non-enforcement. Federal election observers are being pulled from problematic jurisdictions in former Confederate states. And the president’s bully pulpit constantly undermines faith in elections themselves.

As Trump himself said during his campaign: “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”13 That wasn’t just a prediction: it was a threat. Either he wins, or the system is corrupt. There is no room for legitimate defeat in Trump’s worldview.

And now that he’s won a second term, what’s to stop him from seeking a third? Or a fourth? The Twenty-Second Amendment limits presidents to two terms, but with courts increasingly packed with Trump appointees, a DOJ that serves his interests rather than the law, and a Republican Party that has abandoned principle for power, who will enforce this constitutional limit?

Already, Trump allies are floating trial balloons. “His first term was stolen by the Russia hoax and impeachment,” one prominent supporter recently argued on Fox News. “The Constitution should count from his first legitimate term—which is this one.”14 Others suggest that “national emergencies” might require “temporary postponement” of the 2028 election.

Once democratic guardrails are removed, they don’t easily return.

Red Caesar: A Dictator by Another Name

Trump’s authoritarian aspirations aren’t hidden: they’re increasingly celebrated by his intellectual vanguard.

A growing movement within conservative circles, from Claremont Institute scholars to Project 2025 planners, explicitly calls for a “Red Caesar”: an American strongman who rules through emergency powers, bypassing democratic constraints in the name of fighting what they see as cultural decay and internal enemies.

What makes Trump uniquely suited for this role is precisely what we explored in Chapter 1: his family dynamics shaped him to view the world entirely through hierarchies of dominance and submission. As we saw, Fred Trump taught his son that kindness was weakness and that the world was divided simply into “killers” and victims. This worldview—that all human relationships are zero-sum power struggles—is the perfect psychological foundation for an American Caesar.

The mansion in Queens where Trump was raised operated on a value system of acquisition, dominance, and zero-sum competition that stood in stark contrast to the social evolution happening in America during Trump’s formative years. While the civil rights movement, feminism, and counterculture were reshaping society toward greater equality and social justice, the Trump household remained frozen in time.

As clinical psychologist Mary Trump described in her book, which we explored in Chapter 1, her uncle Donald’s personality was formed in response to an “emotional desert”: his grandiosity, his need for constant validation, his inability to admit mistakes, and his casual cruelty all adaptive responses to a psychopathic father who viewed vulnerability as unforgivable weakness.

These childhood lessons have now found their most dangerous expression in his approach to governance, where cooperation is seen as weakness and institutions are viewed not as guardrails but as obstacles to be overcome or weapons to be wielded.

And they’re saying the quiet part out loud. JD Vance, now Trump’s vice president, has argued that a president should “seize power” from the bureaucracy and ignore court rulings that limit executive authority. He promotes the apocryphal story that President Andrew Jackson told Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall to enforce his own order with regard to the Trail of Tears and then ignored the ruling.15

Trump himself has embraced this rhetoric of emergency powers while ranting about supposedly existential threats. “We will root out the communists, the Marxists, the fascists, and the sickos that live like vermin in our country,” he declared in October 2023.16

When a leader compares his opponents to “vermin” who need to be “rooted out,” history leaves little doubt about what comes next. This language isn’t accidental: it’s deliberate signaling about who belongs in Trump’s America and who doesn’t. Who deserves protection and who deserves punishment.

Trump doesn’t need to declare himself a dictator. He simply needs to act like one as long as no one stops him.

The Hungary Model: How Democracy Dies While Life Goes On

In July 2022, CPAC met in Budapest, with Viktor Orbán receiving a standing ovation for declaring that if the GOP wanted real power they had to seize control of the media, the courts, and embark on institutional restructuring. This wasn’t coincidence; it was acknowledgment that Hungary had become the Republican template for America’s potential transformation.17

Having been there and reported from there, I can testify that what makes the Hungarian model so dangerous is how normal it feels to citizens living through it. As Scheppele explains, “The case of Hungary shows how autocrats can rig elections legally, using legislative majorities to change the law and neutralize the opposition at every turn.” Most critically, “it happened through paperwork” rather than violence.18

This is the “frog in boiling water” phenomenon where democracy dies incrementally while daily life continues. People still work, shop, watch sports, and post on social media. Each restriction seems minor until suddenly, they’re not. At first, only critics and targeted minorities feel the full weight of autocratic power, creating powerful incentives for self-^­censorship among the rest of the population.19

The steps Orbán followed have become America’s road map:

· Courts captured through systematic appointments

· Election rules reshaped to favor one party

· Media controlled through regulatory pressure

· Constitutional norms eroded systematically

· Society divided into permanent in-groups and out-groups20

As rights disappear, expectations shift. What once seemed outrageous becomes normal. The psychological accommodation happens gradually, with cognitive dissonance leading many to justify the new reality rather than resist it.21

This pattern is unfolding in America today, and, like in Hungary, it’s a transformation by paperwork, not violence; it’s happening while life appears normal. Until it doesn’t.

The Compliance Apparatus

Beyond individual retribution, Trump has created institutional mechanisms to enforce loyalty. The blueprint had already been tested in states like Florida, Texas, and in Hungary under Orbán.

· Universities now face funding cuts for teaching “anti-­American” ideas (defined as criticism of Trump or conservative orthodoxy).22

· Media companies face regulatory harassment, antitrust investigations, and they and their reporters and commentators are the victims of libel lawsuits.23

· Social media platforms have been given a choice: remove “anti-Trump” content or lose profitable Section 230 protections.

· Federal employees undergo “ideological vetting” with those deemed “woke” or “liberal” purged.

· Private companies face pressure to fire or blacklist Trump critics.

This system of enforced compliance doesn’t require new laws, just the selective enforcement of existing ones. In autocracies, regulatory agencies become weapons aimed at enemies and shields protecting allies.

· The IRS audits Trump critics while ignoring allies’ tax law violations.24

· The FCC targets networks like CNN and MSNBC with regulatory harassment while giving Fox News and right-wing media a free pass.25

· The SEC investigates companies that speak out against Trump’s policies while fast-tracking approvals for supporters.

· Even local police departments feel the pressure, with federal grants tied to their willingness to crack down on protests against Trump while the general right-wing tilt of police departments mean they often ignore violence by his supporters.

This targeted enforcement creates a society where the law no longer protects everyone equally; it protects those in favor and punishes those who aren’t.

The International Warning Signs

On the international front, the warning signs provoked by Trump’s embrace of fascist regimes around the world are already flashing red. NATO allies are voicing concerns about the future of the alliance. Ukraine’s government is desperately seeking assurances that American support will continue. Taiwan is accelerating its defense preparations as China watches developments in Washington.

These aren’t speculative scenarios; they’re the active, real-time responses of global actors to America’s democratic instability. In diplomatic channels and across international forums, frantic discussions are taking place right now about how to adapt to a “post-American global order.” Some countries are hedging their bets, strengthening ties with China and Russia as insurance against US withdrawal from the worldwide family of democratic nations.

Trump’s first term demonstrated his willingness to break with long-standing allies and embrace dictators. His current actions—praising Putin amid Russia’s ongoing war, questioning NATO’s relevance, and suggesting greater accommodation with authoritarian regimes—signal a continuation and acceleration of that approach.

Why It Matters

In a true democracy, to paraphrase Reagan, elections have consequences. When power changes hands, policy changes too. But what happens when the system is rigged so thoroughly that elections no longer meaningfully transfer power?

Consider what’s happening in America today:

· State legislatures, gerrymandered beyond accountability, are passing laws giving themselves more power over election administration.

· The Supreme Court has already ruled in favor of expanded state legislature authority over elections, with more cases pending.

· Voter ID laws, purges, and other restrictions are being implemented with increasing precision to target Democratic-leaning demographic groups.

· Media ecosystems continue to fragment, with Americans increasingly consuming entirely different sets of facts based on their political alignment.

· Corporate money in politics is reaching unprecedented levels, with policy outcomes increasingly aligned with donor preferences rather than public opinion.

These aren’t hypothetical future scenarios; they’re underway right now. The machinery of democracy isn’t destroyed overnight; it’s recalibrated day by day. You can still cast a ballot. You can still enter a voting booth. But the system itself is being restructured to ensure predictable outcomes.

This is how America could see its last genuinely democratic president, not through the abolition of elections, but through their transformation—­like in Russia—into ritualistic exercises that no longer determine who holds power.

For Americans who grew up in a stable democracy, this collapse probably seems unimaginable. But history teaches us that democracies don’t usually die through military coups or dramatic upheavals. They die through step-by-step legal erosion, with elected officials and their bureaucrats and judges dismantling checks and balances while maintaining a façade of legitimacy.

It happened in Hungary under Orbán, in Venezuela under Chávez, in Turkey under Erdoğan, in Russia under Putin. Each began with democratic elections. Each ended with rigged systems where opposition became functionally impossible.

And each happened to a population that couldn’t imagine losing their freedom until it was already gone.

According to Scheppele, the warning signs were clear in Hungary. “For a while, I thought, ‘This would never happen here,’ ” she explained in a 2022 interview. “The biggest mistake that I made was a failure of imagination.”26

Democracy doesn’t announce its departure with trumpets. It slips away in silence, one compromised institution at a time. And Trump—backed by billionaires, amplified by right-wing propaganda networks, funded by foreign oligarchs, and protected by a captured party—has both the means and the motive to make America the next democracy to fall to secure his own safety and wealth.

The endgame isn’t conservatism. It isn’t, in fact, policy at all. It’s a complete restructuring of American governance to ensure permanent rule by a single leader and party. It’s the potential end of the American experiment in regular and peaceful transfers of political power.

This isn’t about left versus right anymore. It’s about democracy versus authoritarianism. And if we don’t recognize this reality soon, Trump may not just be serving his second term: he could be laying the groundwork to become America’s last democratically elected president.

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Part IV: The Last American President

May 2, 2025, was a bad day for the news. Trump proudly announced his executive order kneecapping NPR and PBS, both trusted sources of independent journalism, in a brutal rhetorical attack.1

“Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence,” he declared as he signed the order requiring the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to “cease federal funding for NPR and PBS.” And then came the slap, the insult that followed the injury, as he claimed that both outlets received “tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds each year to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’ ”2

Trump’s message was clear: NPR and CPB had failed the sycophant test and were being used as a vehicle to indirectly threaten any other media outlet that was similarly independent.

This executive order followed, by just a few days, an attempt by Trump to fire three board members of CPB; the news organization fought back by launching a lawsuit to protect its funding and independence. But after lawsuits against all three major TV networks and MSNBC and CNN, along with an FBI investigation into the publisher of Politico for printing an article comparing Donald Trump Jr. to Hunter Biden, the message is unmistakable: speak out against Trump or his administration and there will be a price to pay.

You could call it democide by intimidation.

In the first three parts of this book, we’ve traced the making of Trump, including how his father and Roy Cohn taught him to be a “killer” with little regard for the rule of law. Billionaires, massive corporations, and dark money networks funded his rise, along with help from foreign governments hostile to democracy.

He rose to power by repeatedly appealing to the worst in us, including racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. And now, as dictators and wannabe dictators around the world enthusiastically watch, he’s taking steps to dismantle the social welfare state, legal institutions, and liberal democracy Americans of both parties have carefully built ever since the days of the Republican Great Depression.

So, now comes the work before us, the necessity of confronting the authoritarian playbook that’s worked so well in Russia, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, and so many other countries around the world.

DOGE is deconstructing our federal government at the same time Trump is cozying up to some of the world’s most brutal dictatorships. Senior officials in the administration defend indefensible practices like ICE agents hiding their faces, refusing to identify their agency, and arresting people without court-signed warrants.

But it’s important to realize that authoritarians fear the power of ordinary people more than they do armies, and that’s us, you and me. History shows that the fatal weakness of dictators and those who want to become dictators is their dependence on our silence, our compliance, and their ability to throw people into despair and silence.

Thus, there’s hope. From the streets of Seoul to the town squares of Santiago, from the Solidarity movement I met with in Poland in 2024 to the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina, we’ve seen democracy repeatedly strike back against what first seemed to be overwhelming odds.

Will we be the generation that watches democracy die, or the one who fights like hell to save it?

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FYI, I’ll be a guest on Ali Velshi’s MSNOW show at 11 AM ET this morning, internet and news gods allowing…

Chapter 11: The Climate Collapse Presidency

The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems.

Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement.1 Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.2

When confronted about climate’s role in the devastating 2020 wildfires, Trump smirked: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”3 Tell that to thirteen-year-old Wyatt Tofte, who died in Oregon’s inferno embracing his dog as he tried desperately to save his grandmother.4 As our Western skies turned blood-orange, Louise and I choked from a summer of wild forest fires, and record hurricanes pummeled our coasts, Trump mocked renewable energy and praised coal.

But his second term has proved apocalyptically worse. By April 2025, Trump had reinstated his “Schedule F” executive order, purging government agencies of climate scientists.5 His new EPA administrator—­formerly chief counsel for a coal conglomerate—is suspending methane regulations, gutting emissions standards, and fast-tracking permits for drilling in previously protected Arctic wilderness.6 The phrase “climate emergency” is now prohibited in federal communications, while years of expensive-to-compile government climate data are being systematically altered, hidden, or outright deleted.

Climate collapse reveals democracy’s most fundamental challenge: can we save our planet for our children and grandchildren when fossil fuel profits demand Republicans force inaction? The answer is becoming horrifyingly clear as tipping points approach: permafrost is thawing, ice sheets are destabilizing, and ocean currents are weakening.7

These aren’t distant threats: they’re happening now, accelerated by policies designed to benefit the donor class while sacrificing everyone else.

This betrayal falls hardest on poor and minority communities. Environmental justice and racial justice are inseparable.8 Studies consistently show that communities of color consistently face the highest levels of air pollution, toxic waste, and climate disasters while having the fewest resources to fight back. And to add further injury, Trump and Musk have now gutted FEMA.9

As droughts intensify, coastlines disappear, and climate refugees multiply, the social fabric unravels. Democracy requires at least a modicum of stability, but climate chaos breeds authoritarian “solutions.” The Pentagon itself identifies climate change as a “threat multiplier” that endangers national security. Scientists warn we have less than a decade to halve emissions before crossing irreversible tipping points.10

Our children will judge us not by our tweets or culture wars, but by whether we protected their right to a livable planet. The machinery of climate destruction doesn’t operate in isolation: it’s connected to the plutocracy that captured our courts, the propagandists who poison our media, and the authoritarians who threaten our democratic foundations.

This is the ultimate test of our republic: Can we break the stranglehold of fossil fuel money on our politics? Can we choose a habitable planet over quarterly profits?

Time is running out, and the climate doesn’t negotiate. Physics doesn’t care about political convenience. Either we reclaim our democracy from corporate capture and dark money in politics, or we surrender both a livable planet and our system of government to collapse.

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Chapter 10: Autocrats United

In the stark offices of Kyiv’s Center for Civil Liberties, Oleksandra Matviichuk and her team meticulously document war crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By early 2025, they’ve documented over 68,000 cases since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.1 This Nobel Peace Prize–winning organization has tracked Russia’s crimes against Ukrainian civilians since the 2014 annexation of Crimea.²

I remember watching Louise’s face as we saw news reports of mass graves in Bucha: the shock, horror, and tears. “This is Putin’s work,” she whispered. “But Trump helped make it possible.”

She was right. The bombs falling on Ukrainian cities have many authors, Putin chief among them. But they’re also the indirect result of American acquiescence to autocratic power by Donald Trump, whose presidency marked the first major retreat from democratic values in modern American history.

The Autocrat’s Apprentice

To understand Trump’s deference to dictators, we must return to that mansion in Queens where Fred Trump taught his son that kindness was weakness, and the world was divided into “killers” and losers. These weren’t casual encouragements but imperatives in a household where success meant dominance, not happiness or community contribution.

This foundation was reinforced by Roy Cohn’s scorched-earth tactics, detailed in Chapter 2, which taught Trump that appearance trumped reality, attack was always preferable to defense, and admitting error was tantamount to surrender.

As explored in Chapter 3, Trump’s lifelong commitment to creating the illusion of success found its perfect political expression in his admiration for autocrats. Dictators are masters of façade, projecting strength while their countries crumble, building monuments while their people suffer. Their gold-plated palaces and carefully orchestrated displays of adulation represent the ultimate version of Trump’s own gold-plated brand: power as performance, strength as spectacle.3

The Putin-Trump Partnership Deepens

It was February 12, 2025, when Trump held his first direct call—at least one that we knew about—with Vladimir Putin since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Louise and I watched the news when the story broke, both of us shaking our heads in disbelief.

I thought to myself, this is also how democracies die, not with tanks in the streets, but with phone calls between a real dictator mentoring a man who desperately wants to become one.

Since that ninety-minute conversation, Trump’s rhetoric on Ukraine has increasingly mirrored Putin’s.4 By April, Trump was publicly declaring that “Crimea will stay with Russia” and claiming “Zelenskyy understands that,” functionally legitimizing Russia’s criminal annexation of that territory in clear violation of international law.5

The consequences were immediate. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff—a diplomatically naïve billionaire real estate developer with zero diplomatic experience—has now met repeatedly with Putin in Moscow without an American translator or experts from the State Department or intelligence agencies. He’s been pushing a peace plan that would force Ukraine to surrender significant territory while apparently also (according to press reports) laying plans for a Trump Tower Moscow.6

It’s a pattern we’ve all seen repeatedly since Trump first stepped onto the nation’s political/electoral stage in 2015: autocrats praising Trump’s ego while he surrenders America’s principles. This isn’t diplomacy: it’s capitulation to a foreign power disguised as some sort of bizarre deal-­­­making.

Corporate America’s Autocracy Dividend

And make no mistake: autocracy pays, at least for the autocrats and their oligarch supporters. That’s one aspect of the dirty little secret behind Trump’s affinity for dictators; his corporate backers love how the autocrats he wants to become like crush labor unions, eliminate environmental regulations, and slash corporate taxes while giving them immunity from investigation or prosecution so long as they suck up to and continue to fund the “big man.”

When Trump praises Putin, sides with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, or lauds China’s Xi Jinping for making himself “president for life,” he’s simply voicing what America’s corporate elite view as the natural order of things: hierarchy and money over democracy. (It’s worth noting that the only democratic institutions in a corporation are the unions; everything else resembles an ancient kingdom with CEOs as kings and senior executives and board members as lords and ladies.)7 American corporations have poured trillions into China (in addition to moving much of our manufacturing base there) despite its authoritarianism, profit daily from Saudi Arabia’s repressive regime, and many continued operating in Russia even after its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.8

Take ExxonMobil under Rex Tillerson, for example, who had Putin’s Order of Friendship pinned on his chest in Moscow before becoming Trump’s secretary of state during his first term. His company lobbied the Obama administration aggressively against Russia sanctions following the Crimea invasion; those sanctions would have blocked a potential $500 billion oil deal.9 During Trump’s first term, the new president pushed to immediately lift those very sanctions.

This wasn’t just a twisted, anti-American-values foreign policy; it’s a naked business strategy. Trump’s administrations—particularly this second one—represent the ultimate fusion of corporate and autocratic interests characteristic of nations undergoing the transition out of democracy and into kleptocratic autocracy.

The Helsinki Surrender

I also remember watching that shocking Helsinki press conference in 2018. Louise and I were as stunned as the rest of the world was while Trump stood beside Putin and chose the word of a former KGB spymaster and psychological warfare expert over America’s own intelligence agencies. That wasn’t just a diplomatic blunder: it was groveling submission that humiliated America on the world stage. The same man from Queens who revels in bullying leaders from smaller democratic allies like France or Ukraine folded like a cheap suit in Putin’s presence.10

Standing beside the Russian dictator, Trump sided with Putin over America’s own intelligence agencies—the world’s best—on Russian interference in the 2016 election. It was a public display of fealty by the supposed leader of the free world, bowing to kiss the ass of an autocrat who had explicitly attacked American democracy.11

Trump’s relationship with Putin (and other autocrats) continues to worry international and domestic observers. In March 2025, Trump and Putin began laying groundwork for a ceasefire in Ukraine, with international observers and democracy advocates both worrying and warning that Trump may accept a deal finalizing Russia’s illegal invasion and forcing territorial concessions from Ukraine.12

What our corporate media consistently fails to report is how Putin’s approach to governance—state capture by oligarchs, attacks on independent media, intimidation of the legislative and judicial branches, persecution of political opponents—has become the clear template for Trump’s vision of America.

It’s not just that Trump simply admires Putin; he wants to become Putin.

The Saudi Connection: Arms and Influence

Trump’s embrace of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) reveals his willingness to trade the interests of America for personal profit. When Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the CIA concluded with high confidence that MBS personally ordered the assassination.13

Trump’s response? He vetoed congressional efforts to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia and ignored legal requirements to determine MBS’s responsibility. “I saved his ass,” Trump later boasted to journalist Bob Woodward. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone.”14

Trump’s relationship with MBS has reached disturbing new heights in 2025. In January, MBS pledged to invest $600 billion in the United States, which Trump immediately demanded be “rounded up” to $1 trillion, saying, “I think they’ll do that because we’ve been very good to them.”15

The quid pro quo became clear in April 2025, when reports emerged that Trump plans to offer Saudi Arabia an arms package worth over $100 billion during his May visit.16 This comes despite MBS’s continued human rights abuses and the kingdom’s refusal to hold anyone accountable for Khashoggi’s murder.17

More troubling still is how Saudi Arabia has become central to Trump’s foreign policy, hosting talks between US and Russian officials and mediating international negotiations.18 It’s a perfect illustration of how autocracy’s influence has metastasized under Trump: the country responsible for Khashoggi’s brutal murder now sits at the center of American diplomacy.

The corporate media’s coverage was tepid, presenting it as merely “unconventional diplomacy” rather than complicity in murder to protect weapons contracts worth billions to American defense contractors. The same pattern plays out with Trump’s embrace of Egypt’s el-Sisi, Turkey’s Erdoğan, and other authoritarians, putting corporate profits above human rights and democracy.

The White Christian Nationalist Connection

There’s another pattern in Trump’s favored autocrats: they almost all use white Christian nationalism as a rallying cry against multiculturalism, immigration, and religious diversity.

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has become the poster child for this approach, dismantling democratic institutions while claiming to defend “Christian civilization.” After Trump’s 2016 victory, Orbán jubilantly declared: “We have received permission from the highest position in the world to put ourselves in first place.”19

This white Christian nationalist agenda serves as perfect cover for the economic agenda of autocrats, concentrating wealth in the hands of loyal oligarchs while convincing average citizens that immigrants, minorities, and (Jewish) “globalists” cause their economic struggles, not corruption and crony capitalism.20 By wrapping authoritarianism in Christian religious virtue, leaders like Orbán dismantle democracy while claiming to defend traditional values.

Trump also deploys this same playbook in America, using racist and Christian nationalist rhetoric to energize his base while implementing economic policies benefiting the ultra-wealthy corporate elite who fund his campaigns.

Kim Jong Un: The Nuclear “Friend”

Trump’s bizarre fixation on North Korea’s dictator continues unabated. In January 2025, he promised to “reach out to him again,” despite their previous summits yielding no actual denuclearization. By March, Trump was publicly referring to North Korea as a “nuclear power,” effectively abandoning decades of US policy by accepting Kim’s nuclear arsenal as legitimate.21

What Trump doesn’t mention is that North Korea has dramatically changed its posture since their last meeting, sending thousands of troops to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and strengthening ties with China. Kim is certainly watching Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy with keen interest, calculating how many concessions he might extract from a president desperate for theatrical “wins.”

The Republican Autocrat Tradition

Trump didn’t invent the Republican Party’s fondness for dictators. Nixon embraced Latin American dictatorships, Reagan supported apartheid South Africa and set up strongman governments in Central America, and Bush rehabilitated Uzbekistan’s murderous regime after 9/11.22

What Trump did was drop the pretense that these alliances had anything to do with “national security” or “strategic interests.” He openly admires these regimes because of their authoritarianism, not despite it.

Republican leaders increasingly celebrate this shift. At the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), they displayed a golden statue of Trump, that being a perfect symbol of the party’s transition from a conservative political organization to a personality cult modeled on authoritarian movements worldwide.23 That golden idol was no joke; it represented a party abandoning political principles for devotion to a single man.

The Autocrat Strategy: A Dangerous Pattern

These aren’t isolated incidents: they represent a coherent strategy that prioritizes relationships with dictators over democratic allies. Trump’s approach to foreign policy is fundamentally transactional, viewing international relations through the same lens as his real estate deals: whoever offers the biggest financial package gets the best treatment, regardless of their human rights record.

The pattern is consistent:

· Praise the dictator personally while ignoring their abuses.
· Focus on financial transactions over democratic values.
· Bypass professional diplomats in favor of inexperienced loyalists.
· Capitalize on American retreat to pursue personal business interests.

As one expert noted regarding Trump’s relationship with Arab autocrats: “There’s no policy process, there’s no interagency process. You have the cell phone number of someone. . . . You can either make a call or WhatsApp and get stuff done, and that’s basically the way they do business.”24 That’s precisely the problem; democratic governance depends on process, transparency, and institutional guardrails that Trump consistently undermines.

Media Normalization of the Unthinkable

“Putin is a killer,” Bill O’Reilly said to Trump in a 2017 interview.

“There are a lot of killers,” Trump shot back. “You think our country’s so innocent?”25

In a functioning democracy with responsible media, this statement alone—a sitting president equating America with Putin’s murderous regime—would have dominated headlines for months and ended a presidency. Can you imagine if Clinton, Obama, or Biden had said such a thing?

Instead, within days the news cycle had moved on, the incident becoming just another “Trump being Trump” moment in an endless stream of normalized abnormality.

This is also how democracies die: gradually, to paraphrase Hemingway, then suddenly. The corporate media’s failure to maintain any sort of prolonged focus on Trump’s autocratic behavior and admiration for dictators stems from a profit-driven corporate media and social media system where outrage drives revenue, but sustained critique threatens access and advertising dollars.26

I see it on my radio show with a depressing regularity. Listeners call in stunned by Trump’s latest embrace of one or another dictator, but within twenty-­four hours, some new outrage pushes it from the headlines. This dangerous psychological numbing has set in even among those who recognize the threat.

American Implementation of the Autocrat’s Playbook

Trump’s embrace of foreign autocrats and their ways of governing their nations has become official US policy through:

Information Control: Following Putin’s (and Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Orbán’s, and Mussolini’s) playbook, Trump calls critical reporting “fake news” and labels journalists as “enemies of the people,” rhetoric that leads directly to death threats against reporters.27

Loyalty Tests: Just as autocrats demand personal loyalty above duty to the nation, Trump purges officials who show more loyalty to the Constitution than to him personally.

Weaponizing Law Enforcement: Following the autocratic principle that law exists to serve power rather than constrain it, Trump repeatedly—and publicly—pressures his Justice Department and FBI to investigate opponents and protect allies.28

This isn’t just rhetoric; it’s the methodical installation of autocratic governance, enabled by Republican leaders who’ve abandoned principled conservatism for proximity to wealth and power.

The Grassroots Resistance

Despite this grim picture, there’s hope. Americans across the political spectrum are increasingly recognizing Trump’s threat and are mobilizing to protect our democracy.

Civil servants risk careers to blow the whistle on abuses. Judges—including many Republican appointees—uphold the rule of law against unprecedented pressure. Journalists persist in reporting truth despite threats. And millions of ordinary citizens defend democratic values at the ballot box and in their communities.

Oleksandra Matviichuk reminds us that our democracy isn’t just a system of government; it’s a mindset, a commitment to human dignity that must be actively defended. “Because it is not NATO that Putin fears, it is democracy. Dictators fear the idea of freedom.”29

Why It Matters

When Matviichuk documents Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, she’s representing a global community that is struggling across the world against rising authoritarianism on four continents.

Donald Trump didn’t invent autocracy but he embraces it, legitimizes it, normalizes it, and has been aggressively importing its methods into our government. His embrace of corrupt dictators aren’t simply diplomatic failures; they are, in fact, existential threats to democracy itself across the planet.

What kept tyrants in check over this past century was American leadership: the example of a nation committed to the foundational principles of democracy articulated by our Founders, fought and died for by generations of American patriots, with the awesome economic and military power we’ve built over the centuries to back them up. Trump has systematically undermined each of these democratic bulwarks, thus helping empower a global authoritarian resurgence that threatens to reverse a century of worldwide democratic progress.30

It’s almost impossible to overstate the danger. When the world’s most powerful democracy openly sucks up to or does corrupt business with dictators like Putin, Orbán, and MBS, it doesn’t just damage America’s standing: it emboldens autocrats and wannabe autocrats globally to crush dissent and loot their own nations, knowing they’ll face no meaningful consequences from America.

The damage to our nation and the rule of law will outlast Trump’s presidency. Democracies eroded, alliances frayed, and norms shattered can’t be instantly restored by an election or even the impeachment of Trump. History tells us that the global balance of power, once tipped away from democratic governance and redirected toward authoritarian models, requires enormous effort to rebalance.

Fred Trump taught his son that the world is divided into killers and prey. Roy Cohn taught him that appearance matters more than reality. Trump’s business career taught him that you can fail repeatedly and still claim victory. Putin taught him that lies and the corruption of business elites can work. And now, as president again, Trump is teaching the rest of the world’s autocrats and wannabe dictators a deadly lesson: America is no longer democracy’s defender. Instead, we’ve become autocracy’s enabler.

This isn’t just politics. It’s a war for democracy’s soul. And we’re all on the front lines.

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Chapter 9: America Ungoverned

On a blistering April morning in 2025, Elizabeth Aniskevich stood outside a community center in Washington, DC, filling out yet another job application. Just two months previously, she was an attorney at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with what she thought would be a lifetime career in public service. Now, at thirty-nine, she’s watching her emergency savings dwindle as she struggles to make mortgage payments on her DC apartment.

“I was completely shocked,” she told a reporter for CNBC, describing the day she received her termination notice. “I didn’t expect it to unfold this way. There’s no information about what’s going on with my benefits, or what I need to do with unemployment.”1

Across town, Sarah Boim, a thirty-eight-year-old former employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, is facing a similar nightmare. “Your career is ripped away from you, with no money to move forward,” she explained. Her mental health has deteriorated so severely that her therapist insisted she immediately see a psychiatrist for anti­depressant medication. “I have bipolar. It’ll mess up my life if I have an episode. So we’re just trying to be really careful. I’m hearing stuff like that across the agency.”2

These stories are replicated thousands of times across America as the second Trump administration wages an unprecedented war on the federal workforce and, in the process, a war on the very concept of professional, competent governance. As I and multiple experts on fascism have warned for years, this is what happens when an authoritarian mindset takes control of the levers of power: institutions are hollowed out, expertise is denigrated, and ordinary Americans pay the price.

The Great Unraveling 2.0

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he wasted no time implementing what his former strategist Steve Bannon had called the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”3 This wasn’t just campaign rhetoric; it was a deliberate plan to dismantle the federal government’s capacity to function on behalf of the people, leaving only its supports and subsidies for giant corporations and the wealthy.

The instrument of this destruction is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by billionaire Elon Musk, created through an executive order on inauguration day, January 20, 2025.4 Within weeks, DOGE had deployed teams of tech industry recruits—many in their teens and twenties with no government experience or security clearances—to federal agencies, where they began demanding access to sensitive personnel and financial data and directing mass firings.

The sheer scale of the purge is staggering. According to the Office of Personnel Management, over 200,000 federal workers had been laid off between the time Trump took office and early May 2025 (as I’m writing this), and approximately 75,000 federal employees have been forced to accept “deferred resignations” or buyout plans.5 In some agencies, the cuts are even deeper. The Education Department alone is eliminating nearly 50 percent of its workforce, more than 1,300 positions through reductions in force, plus another 600 through “voluntary” separations.6

This isn’t a normal political transition or a routine government reorganization. It’s instead a systematic effort to cripple the American government’s ability to protect citizens, enforce laws, and deliver essential services.

The Human Cost

For federal workers caught in this purge, the consequences are devastating. In Philadelphia, dozens gathered in the basement of the Queen Memorial Library for what organizers call a “Federal Employee Transition Workshop.” Some had been fired only to be yanked back or told they could be yanked back. Others had been placed on “administrative leave” with no explanation. Several reported being terminated for supposed “performance reasons” despite glowing evaluations, and now can’t prove their competence to potential employers because they’ve been locked out of their files.7

“They want us gone,” laments a government IT specialist, “but they’re making it so hard to get away.”8

The impact extends far beyond the affected employees. A fifty-four-year-old suicide prevention case manager with the Department of Veterans Affairs—who voted for Trump in 2024—now carries guilt over his vote as he watches the administration’s assault on his colleagues. “It’s not about the layoffs,” he says. “It’s about a dehumanization of who we are and what we do. . . . We don’t do it for the applause. We do it to serve our country and serve our community. You get into public service not for the money but because you want to be part of something greater than yourself.”9

A federal manager and Marine Corps veteran described the paralyzing fear that gripped his agency. “People are afraid to make a move that could result in an email dismissal,” he says. “It’s heartbreaking. . . . I have been trained to be a leader, and Trump and Musk are not allowing me to do my job. It’s micromanaging at the highest level.”10

What’s particularly insidious about the Trump-DOGE approach is how it appears designed to maximize chaos and suffering. As Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, said before the election: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”11

They’re succeeding. One Department of Defense employee, a man who served his country with two tours in Iraq, told NBC News that his post-traumatic stress disorder was triggered to the point that he called a suicide hotline, then visited an emergency room at a veterans’ hospital.12 In the months since then, the suicide hotline lost much of its funding to Trump’s cuts.

Expertise under Attack

This assault on the federal workforce isn’t just causing personal tragedies; it’s systematically purging the expertise needed for effective governance. On March 12, 2025, Trump’s EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced what the agency called the “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” targeting more than two dozen environmental rules protecting the environment for elimination or weakening.13

Among the targets are rules limiting pollution from vehicles and power plants, regulations on soot and mercury emissions, and the “good neighbor rule” that regulates downwind air pollution. Most significantly, the EPA is preparing to reconsider the scientific findings on the dangers of climate pollution that have served as the basis for federal climate regulations, a move that would strip the EPA of its authority to manage greenhouse gas emissions at all.14

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, these rollbacks “will leave the nation sicker and our air, water and soil dangerously contaminated” while “sacrificing human health for the benefit of private industry.”15

The anti-science approach extends beyond the EPA. Trump’s administration has laid off hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and removed mentions of climate change from public websites. The administration has also issued executive orders with language that could block enforcement of state and local laws that restrict production or use of fossil fuels.16

A Government in Chaos

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the administration’s destructive approach is the fate of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), America’s primary international humanitarian organization. In early February 2025, USAID’s website went dark, employees were barred entry to their headquarters, and all direct-hire personnel were placed on administrative leave.17

On March 19, 2025, US District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that DOGE’s dismantling of USAID likely violated the Constitution, writing that the destruction of the agency harmed the public interest by depriving elected lawmakers of their “constitutional authority to decide whether, when and how to close down an agency created by Congress.”18 But by then, international aid programs had already been suspended, creating humanitarian crises around the world.

Beyond direct firings, the administration has taken a more insidious approach to dismantling agencies. According to documents obtained by the Washington Post, DOGE developed step-by-step plans for carrying out Trump’s order to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from the federal government and over six months intends to expand that campaign dramatically to target staff who are not in DEI roles but perform functions that DOGE’s young workers determine are related to DEI.19

This leaves federal workers in a terrifying limbo. Katherine Freeman, who worked as an administrative assistant for the CDC specializing in tuberculosis, received a mass email saying she had been fired because of her performance. She had been at the agency for just ten months.20

Legal Challenges Mount

Multiple federal courts have found these mass firings illegal. US District Judge James Bredar ruled in a case brought by nineteen states and the District of Columbia that the firings amount to a “large-scale reduction in force” subject to specific rules, including giving advance notice to states affected by the layoffs.21

On March 14, 2025, Judge Bredar ordered eighteen federal agencies to reinstate probationary workers fired through what he called “illegal RIFs” (reductions in force), covering probationary employees nationwide.22

US District Judge John Bates characterized DOGE’s work as “opaque” when he ordered an official to testify in a lawsuit against the Trump administration. Shockingly, it was the first time anybody involved with DOGE was required to answer questions under oath from an attorney outside the government.23

Openly defying many of these legal challenges, the Trump administration continues to push forward with its agenda. The White House response to these court orders has been defiant, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declaring that “a single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch.”24

The DOGE Paradox

While Musk initially claimed DOGE would cut $2 trillion from federal spending—­­­a figure even higher than the entire discretionary spending budget of the United States—he has repeatedly revised this target downward, eventually settling on $150 billion in April 2025.25

Even these reduced figures are highly questionable. According to NPR, DOGE’s moves to cancel contracts, end leases, and push agencies to reduce headcount “barely dent the government’s balance sheet.” As of March 2025, for every dollar the federal government had spent since the start of the fiscal year, DOGE claimed to have saved about four cents.26

The disconnect between DOGE’s stated goals and actual operations has led many to question its true purpose. Veteran Republican budget experts have said DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts appear “driven more by an ideological assault on federal agencies long hated by conservatives than a good-faith effort to save taxpayer dollars.”27

Bill Hoagland, a former Republican staffer and director of the Senate Budget Committee for more than twenty years, told Reuters, “The playbook has not been for the dollar savings, but more for the philosophical and ideological differences conservatives have with the work these agencies do.”28

Adding to the contradictions, while Musk and his team demand budget cuts across government, funding for DOGE itself has soared to nearly $40 million as of April 2025, according to records from the Office of Management and Budget reviewed by ProPublica.29

Why It Matters

This is how democracies die; not in a single dramatic moment, but through the slow, methodical dismantling of the institutions that make governance possible. What we’re witnessing isn’t mere political disagreement or partisan policy shifts; it’s a fundamental attack on the capacity of our government to function at all.

As I’ve written (and ranted on the radio) for decades, the corporate right has long dreamed of dismantling the regulatory state created during the 1930s’ New Deal and expanded during the 1960s’ Great Society. They’ve wanted to cripple government’s ability to protect workers, consumers, and the environment from corporate exploitation ever since David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on a platform of ending virtually all federal agencies except the military and the courts. Now, under Trump and DOGE, they’re achieving large parts of this vision with frightening speed.

The consequences fall hardest on ordinary Americans who depend on a functioning government. When the EPA can’t enforce clean air and water standards, communities suffer. When FEMA lacks the resources to respond to disasters, lives are lost. When the CDC loses key scientific expertise, public health is endangered.

But the deeper threat is to democracy itself. When a president can effectively nullify laws passed by Congress by refusing to implement them or by deliberately breaking the agencies charged with enforcement, the constitutional separation of powers is threatened. When career civil servants dedicated to following the law are replaced with political loyalists dedicated only to following orders, the rule of law itself is at risk, as well as the competence of government.

Sarah Boim, a former CDC employee who says her mental health has been affected by losing her job, put it best. Reflecting on the chaos unleashed by DOGE, she told a reporter for NBC News: “Taking a sledgehammer approach and having an unelected billionaire in my email is just insane. What are his qualifications for doing this? The government is not a startup; we have been in business since 1776.”30

The battle over America’s governance isn’t about “big government” versus “small government.” It’s about functional government versus dysfunctional government, about whether we’ll have a government of laws or a government of men, about whether we will remain a democracy or slide into authoritarianism.

Because when governance fails, people suffer. And that’s a truth that transcends politics.

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Chapter 8: The Heist of Democracy

How America’s Voting Rights Were Stolen in 2024

The corporate media keeps telling us that Donald Trump won the 2024 election fair and square. They’re almost certainly wrong: Joe Biden was, in my opinion, the last fairly elected American president.

Democracy lost big-time on November 5, 2024. This wasn’t because of fancy software hacks or the fever dreams of some convoluted China/Venezuela voting machine conspiracy, but through an old-fashioned, systematic campaign of voter suppression similar to the ones that characterized the fifty years or so following the collapse of Reconstruction. What we witnessed in the election of 2024—and the media still has yet to acknowledge—was Jim Crow 2.0, and it worked exactly as well as it did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

How They Stole It: The Numbers Don’t Lie

The story is actually fairly straightforward: if all legal voters had been allowed to vote and if all the legal ballots had been counted, Kamala Harris would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Instead of a second Trump administration, Harris would have become our president with 286 electoral votes.

The US Elections Assistance Commission (an official government agency) data tell us the damning story: a staggering 4.7 million voters were purged from the voter rolls before the election, all on the false claim of “voter fraud,” something so rare that you’re more likely to be hit by lightning than to ever encounter it.1

By August 2024, self-proclaimed “vigilante” vote “fraud hunters” had challenged the eligibility of 317,886 voters across multiple states.2 When Election Day arrived, millions more were disenfranchised; the Georgia NAACP, for example, estimates challenges exceeded 200,000 people whose right to vote was stripped from them months before the election in Georgia alone.3

This was a coordinated national strategy, organized and executed by the GOP and several mostly billionaire-funded groups aligned with it:

— Over 2.1 million mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors.4
— 585,000 in-person ballots were thrown out.5
— 1.2 million “provisional” (what I call “placebo”) ballots were rejected without being counted.6
— 3.2 million new voter registrations were rejected or not processed in time.7

And here’s the true obscenity, the kicker that the mainstream media refuses to even discuss (for a variety of reasons): these rejections weren’t random. A state audit in Washington, for example, found Black voters were four times more likely than white voters to have their mail-in ballots rejected.8 And that pattern repeated nationwide. In Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia, analyses showed that officials flagged Black voters’ mail ballots at more than twice the rate of white voters’ ballots.9

The KKK Playbook, Updated for the Digital Age

Georgia was the biggest test kitchen for the new Jim Crow cooking, with Governor Brian Kemp as head chef, a role he’d played in previous elections by purging voters when he was secretary of state and running for the governorship.

First, they used what my old friend reporter Greg Palast calls “Poison Postcards”: official-looking mail sent to targeted voters. When Georgians (especially young, poor, and Black or Hispanic voters) didn’t return these postcards (which were designed to look like junk mail), they were removed from voter rolls, a purging process that five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized in 2018 with the Husted decision. In Georgia, for example, the response rate to these cards was barely above 1 percent.10

Then came the so-called “vigilante” challenges. In 2020, Palast uncovered a scheme where Republican operatives challenged the voting eligibility of 180,000 Georgians. Deeper investigation revealed this tactic was based on a program first deployed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1946.11 For 2024, the Georgia legislature changed state law to make it nearly impossible for election officials to deny these challenges, and the program went nationwide.

By August 2024, True the Vote and similar organizations had signed up 40,000 volunteer “vigilantes” who challenged nearly a million voters.12 A documentary film shows one Republican official, Pam Reardon, who personally challenged over 32,000 voters. When asked if she had verified any of the challenges, she admitted on camera, “I can’t go through 32,000 people. I was handed the list by True the Vote.”13

The Mail-In Ballot Attack

Republicans spent four years demonizing mail-in voting after the 2020 election, and it paid off. In Georgia, SB 202 slashed the number of ballot drop boxes by 75 percent—but only in Black-majority counties—and locked them away at night.14 These moves reduced mail-in and drop-box balloting (used by the majority of Democrats in 2020) by nearly 90 percent.

The attacks on mail ballots were particularly devastating because research consistently shows racial disparities in rejection rates. In North Carolina, multiple analyses found Black voters’ mail ballots were rejected at more than twice the rate of white voters’ ballots.15 In Texas, after new ID requirements were enacted, the rejection rate jumped from 1.7 percent to 12 percent during the March 2022 primary, with minority voters bearing the brunt.16

Provisional Ballots: The Ultimate Scam

Perhaps the cruelest trick was the “provisional” ballot. If you showed up to vote and found you’d been challenged or purged, you were offered one of these ballots and told your registration would be checked. What they didn’t tell you is that unless you personally went to your county clerk’s office with ID and proof of address afterward, your ballot was likely trashed.

According to the US Elections Assistance Commission, in 2016, when 2.5 million provisional ballots were cast nationwide, a breathtaking 42.3 percent were never counted.17 And Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters were 300 percent more likely than white voters to be shunted to these “placebo” ballots.18

The Deadly Math

When we apply the most conservative calculation to these numbers, the suppression factor in 2024 was at least 2.3 percent of the vote. That translates to approximately 3,565,000 votes that, largely, should have gone to Kamala Harris. With those ballots properly counted, she would have topped Trump’s official total by 1.2 million and won the Electoral College with 286 votes.19

This isn’t speculative: it’s the cold, hard math based on documented evidence from our own federal government. And it’s exactly what Republican officials designed their laws to do. As Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton proudly stated on Steve Bannon’s podcast after blocking Houston from sending mail ballots during COVID, “Had we not done that, Donald Trump would’ve lost the election [in Texas].”20

America’s Nasty Little Secret

The nasty little secret of American democracy is that we don’t count all the votes. Nor do we let every citizen vote. Because America is the only advanced democracy in the world where voting is a privilege rather than a right of citizenship.

Since 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, “At least 30 states enacted 78 restrictive laws” to make voting harder.21 Why would legislators fight so hard to pass these laws if they didn’t affect election outcomes? The answer is clear when you look at the map of states with the most restrictive voting laws: it mirrors Trump’s 2024 victory map almost perfectly.

America deserves an answer to this question: Excluding the boost from Jim Crow vote suppression games, did Donald Trump win? The evidence clearly shows he did not.

What Happens Now?

Martin Luther King Jr. gave us our marching orders back in 1965, and they’re just as important today: “Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around. We are on the move now.”22

Democracy can win, despite the GOP’s 2.3 percent suppression headwind. After the 2016 election, Palast and others exposed a cruel, racist purge program called “Interstate Crosscheck” that cost nearly a million voters their rights. The Reverend Jesse Jackson launched a campaign that successfully shut down Crosscheck. Joe Biden couldn’t have won in 2020 without that victory saving hundreds of thousands of votes.

We need to organize now to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections, and the attitude that this is somehow acceptable in a true democracy.

That fight starts with naming what happened clearly and honestly: Trump didn’t win. Vote suppression did.

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Part III: The Global Damage

The Beginning: How Trump Lit the Match

So far in this book, we’ve explored the making of a young Donald Trump, from the Queens mansion where Fred Trump taught domination as virtue, to Roy Cohn’s ruthless tutelage in shamelessness, to the golden façade he constructed that (with help from NBC and Mark Burnett) masked a lifetime of business failures. We’ve exposed the machinery that propelled him to power: a Republican Party that back during the Nixon and Reagan years first abandoned principle for tribal loyalty, the billionaire donors who funded extremism for tax cuts, and a series of billionaire-funded right-wing media empires that amplify outrage over truth on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis into tens of millions of American cars and homes.

But Trump’s assault on democracy hasn’t just been confined to the territory within America’s borders. His presidency is far more dangerous to nations across the world who embrace the ideals of our Founders; it represents a tragic and disastrous surrender of America’s role as the leader of the free world and the planet’s number one defender of democracy.

In these chapters, we’ll see how Trump’s embrace of dictators from Putin to Mohammed bin Salman to Kim Jong Un wasn’t just embarrassing or even incompetent diplomacy; it was the betrayal of America’s foundational promises going back 250 years, and touched off a green light for autocrats worldwide. We’ll see how he and the true believers in his administration actively sabotaged America’s capacity to deal with crises by attacking expertise, purging scientists, rewriting history, attacking the weakest among us, and politicizing every institution he could get his hands on.

This damage goes far beyond routine diplomatic embarrassments or simple policy disagreements. When Trump stood beside Putin in Helsinki and sided with the Russian dictator over America’s own intelligence agencies, he didn’t just commit political malpractice; he signaled to every struggling democracy in the entire world that America was done standing in the way of the expansion of authoritarianism and neofascism.

When his people (and Elon Musk’s teenagers) systematically dismantled the EPA and he abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement (for a second time), he didn’t just set back climate progress; he actively and maliciously accelerated planetary destruction in exchange for profits for his fossil fuel supporters, with consequences that will echo down through generations of human suffering.

Just like when his COVID-19 response degenerated into a performance of denial, magical thinking, and forced Blue states to compete for PPE and resources, he’s again revealing how quickly a government hollowed out by a cynical, profit- and corruption-driven sabotage can collapse into dysfunction that hurts (and even kills) its own citizens.

These failures—including his bizarre performance with tariffs in early 2025—aren’t accidents or simple incompetence (although they contain elements of both): they’re the predictable outcomes of an administration that views the American government and its civil service as an enemy to be subdued, expertise as a threat to be discarded, and the historic norms of democracy that generations of Americans shed their blood for as optional.

In Part IV, we’ll confront the nightmare scenario of Trump’s second term: the machinery he built, the norms he shattered, and the alliances he damaged that have led to a systematic destruction of democracy itself here in the land of the free.

What happens in this twilight of American democracy impacts every person on Earth. The global damage of Trump’s presidency has only just begun.

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Chapter 7: From Birtherism to the Big Lie

Ruby Freeman just wanted to count votes.

She wasn’t a politician or activist. She was a sixty-two-year-old grandmother running a small fashion boutique called “Lady Ruby’s Unique Treasures” in suburban Atlanta. In fall 2020, seeking to do her civic duty during a pandemic that kept many older poll workers home, she took a temporary job with Fulton County’s election office. Her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, had worked for the county elections department for a decade, and Ruby was proud to join her in supporting the democratic process, something particularly meaningful to her as a Black woman whose ancestors had been denied the right to vote.

“I’ve always been told by my father how important it is to vote,” Freeman later testified before the January 6th Committee, “and how people before me, a lot of people, older people in my family, did not have that right.”1

On Election Day and the days that followed, Ruby and Shaye worked long shifts at State Farm Arena, processing ballots with care and precision. It was the unglamorous but essential work of democracy.

Then Donald Trump lost Georgia, the first Republican presidential candidate to do so since 1992. What followed was a targeted campaign of lies so vicious, so persistent, and so personal that it destroyed Ruby Freeman’s life and nearly broke American democracy itself.

I’ve seen a lot in my decades as a political commentator and activist, but nothing prepared me for watching an American president use the machinery of right-wing media to target ordinary citizens doing their civic duty. This wasn’t just politics; it was deliberate character assassination with real victims.

Trump’s allies, including his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, seized on surveillance footage from State Farm Arena, falsely claiming it showed election workers committing fraud. The video actually showed normal ballot processing, but Giuliani presented deceptively edited clips to Georgia state senators, alleging workers had pulled “suitcases” of illegal ballots from under tables after observers were sent home.2

State investigators, including those working for Republican officials, quickly determined the “suitcases” were standard ballot containers and all protocols had been followed properly.3 But by that time, facts didn’t matter. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss had been selected as targets in service of a larger lie, the false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump.

Trump himself mentioned Ruby Freeman by name eighteen times in his infamous January 2, 2021, phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, calling her “a professional vote scammer,” “a hustler,” and “known scammer” without a shred of evidence.4 Giuliani told Georgia legislators that Freeman and Moss were passing “USB ports” to each other “like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” The object referred to in this racist screed was actually a ginger mint.5

Right-wing media outlets published dozens of false stories about Freeman and Moss. Online mobs doxxed Freeman, publishing her phone number, address, and photos of her license plate. White supremacist groups sent death threats. Armed “protesters” surrounded her home.

On January 6, 2021—the day of the Capitol insurrection—the FBI called Freeman and told her to leave her home immediately; they had information that people were headed to her address. She didn’t return home for two months.6

“I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation,” Freeman testified. “I’ve lost my sense of security, all because a group of people, starting with Number 45 and his ally Rudy Giuliani, decided to scapegoat me and my daughter, Shaye, to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen.”7

The trauma was so severe that both women changed their appearances, moved repeatedly, and stopped using their names in public. Moss quit her job. Freeman’s business collapsed. Both became virtual prisoners, afraid to go to the grocery store, to the pharmacy, or even to walk their dogs.

“I don’t want to be a citizen of the United States anymore,” Freeman told the committee. “Now I question everything. All because I did my job.”

This is one small part of what Trump’s lies did.

The Industrialization of Lying

Trump didn’t invent political lying; in all probability, every president has lied at some time. Lyndon Johnson lied about Vietnam. Richard Nixon lied about Watergate. Bill Clinton lied about his affair. But these were defensive lies, attempts to cover up mistakes or misdeeds.

Trump did something fundamentally different, something we’ve never seen in American politics: he industrialized lying, transforming it from an occasional defensive tactic into a constant, offensive strategy.

Where previous politicians lied to cover mistakes, Trump used lies as a central governing tool to shape reality itself, to build a cult of personality immune to contradictory facts, and to systematically destroy accountability mechanisms that might constrain his power.

The scope was unprecedented. The Washington Post documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during Trump’s presidency, an average of 21 falsehoods per day, increasing to 39 per day in his final year.8 This wasn’t accidental. It was strategic.

Trump understood that in today’s fractured media ecosystem, with social media’s top-secret algorithms prioritizing engagement over accuracy and audiences self-sorting into ideological silos, lies could serve as a form of tribal identity. By getting supporters to believe obvious falsehoods, he severed their connection to our collective shared reality and bound them more tightly to him. Believing the lie became an act of loyalty, a way of signaling commitment to Trump and his movement.

As historian Timothy Snyder observed, “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”9 By destroying the basis for shared factual understanding, Trump cleared the ground for authoritarian governance, creating conditions where power alone, not verifiable reality, determines what is accepted as true.

And the Republican Party, rather than checking this assault on truth, largely followed Trump’s lead. From elected officials to right-wing media to rank-and-file voters, the party that once prided itself on clear-eyed realism embraced what Trump’s spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts.”10

The result is a movement built on foundational falsehoods, engineered not to persuade through reasoned argument but to inflame through emotional manipulation, to divide Americans into warring realities, and ultimately to dominate through raw power unconstrained by factual accountability.

This machinery of lies didn’t emerge fully formed. It evolved from a single, powerful falsehood that launched Trump’s political career and served as a prototype for the bigger, more destructive lies to come.

Birtherism: The Original Sin

I remember watching in disbelief in 2011 as Donald Trump, then just a reality TV star and failed casino magnate, began aggressively promoting the false claim that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen and therefore held office illegitimately. Though “birtherism” had circulated in fringe corners of the internet since Obama’s 2008 campaign, Trump used his celebrity and media platform to inject it directly into mainstream discourse.

“I’m starting to think that he was not born here,” Trump declared on ABC’s The View, adding falsely that “nobody from those early years remembers him.” On NBC’s Today show, he claimed, “I’m starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country.”11

None of these claims had factual basis. Obama had released his short-form birth certificate during the 2008 campaign, and his birth announcement had appeared in Honolulu newspapers when he was born in 1961. Even the former Republican governor of Hawaii Linda Lingle had confirmed the validity of his birth records.

But Trump wasn’t interested in facts. He was testing a political strategy, one that combined racial grievance, conspiracy thinking, and attacks on institutional legitimacy. Birtherism offered white conservatives a way to express racial resentment toward a Black president without explicit racism, to justify opposition to Obama as based not on prejudice but on constitutional principle.

In April 2011, exasperated by persistent questioning, Obama released his long-form birth certificate. At a press conference, he said, “We do not have time for this kind of silliness. . . . We’ve got better stuff to do.”12

Most politicians would have acknowledged error and moved on but, true to his Roy Cohn training, Trump did the opposite. He claimed victory while continuing to cast doubt, telling CNN, “I hope it’s true . . . but a lot of people have very serious questions.”13

That moment revealed much about Trump’s emerging lie-based strategy:

· Facts don’t end the lie. Even irrefutable evidence becomes just another opportunity to raise more “questions.”

· The liar claims victory regardless of outcome. Whether proven wrong or right, Trump always positions himself as the hero of the narrative.

· The lie’s utility is far more important than its factual status. Whether Obama was born in Hawaii was irrelevant; Trump’s (and the GOP’s) real purpose was undermining his legitimacy and stoking racial resentment.

· Media coverage amplifies the lie. Even when news outlets debunked Trump’s claims, they gave him enormous free publicity which spread the lie even farther.

This was the birth of what would later be called “Trumpism,” a political approach centered not on policy or ideology, but on grievance, tribal identity, and the systematic replacement of factual reality with empowering fiction combined with a cult of personality worthy of Jim Jones.

Birtherism was Trump’s test case, and America failed it. The Republican Party didn’t forcefully denounce him. Mainstream media treated his claims as worthy of debate rather than immediate dismissal. A substantial portion of the electorate proved willing to believe a transparent falsehood that validated their preexisting biases and resentments.

It established the template for what would eventually become the Big Lie about the 2020 election and the 2025 Big Lie about Venezuela “invading” the United States: both were racism dressed as constitutional concern, conspiracy wrapped in patriotism, and truth treated as entirely optional in service of political power.

The Trump Disinformation Engine

When Trump entered the White House in January 2017, he brought with him a sophisticated machinery for manufacturing and disseminating falsehoods at industrial scale. Since his reelection in 2024, he’s upped the game by eliminating any of the dissenting voices that characterized his first term and threatening the media in a way that would make Orbán or Putin proud. His tool kit is straightforward:

· Trump himself as the primary source, with his uncanny ability to dominate news cycles and capture attention through provocative, often false statements

· Social media, particularly Twitter (now X), Truth Social, and Facebook, which allow Trump to bypass traditional media filters and inject falsehoods directly into the public discourse

· Right-wing media ecosystem, led by Fox News but expanding to include Breitbart, One America News Network, Newsmax, 1,500 right-wing radio stations, podcasters, and numerous online outlets that amplify and elaborate on Trump’s falsehoods

· Republican Party officials who, rather than correcting the record, often repeat and reinforce Trump’s false claims

· Foreign and domestic disinformation networks, particularly those based in Russia, that recognize Trump’s utility as a chaos agent and work to amplify his most divisive messages

Each lie serves specific strategic functions:

· Deflect blame for failures onto others, including Democrats, the media, China, immigrants, and even his own appointees when they’re no longer useful.

· Rally the base by confirming their biases and resentments, particularly against “elites,” defenseless minorities, immigrants, and Trump’s perceived enemies.

· Attack critics and institutions that might constrain his power or hold him accountable.

· Distort reality to create a world where his claims of success seem plausible to his base and low-information voters despite contradictory evidence.

For Trump, truth wasn’t a value to be respected but an obstacle to be overcome in the pursuit of power. As journalist M. Gessen wrote, “Lying is the message. . . . It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”14

This approach has had devastatingly corrosive effects on American democracy. By flooding the zone with falsehoods, Trump has created confusion and exhaustion that made many citizens simply give up on determining what was true. By attacking sources of factual information as “fake news,” he delegitimized America’s independent press which, as our Founders intended, serves as a crucial check on power. By promoting conspiracy theories from the Oval Office, he normalized fringe beliefs and brought them into mainstream discourse.

Perhaps most dangerously, he’s created what former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt called “alternate realities” for his supporters: hermetically sealed information ecosystems where inconvenient facts can’t penetrate and where loyalty to Trump is measured by willingness to believe and repeat his falsehoods, no matter how absurd or easily disproven.15

The Psychology of Mass Deception

What made Trump’s lies so devastatingly effective wasn’t just their volume or the platforms amplifying them; it was how they exploited fundamental vulnerabilities in human cognition. Cognitive scientists have long understood that once humans adopt a belief, they tend to prioritize information confirming that belief while discounting contradictory evidence, what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” Trump’s Big Lies tap directly into this psychological tendency, creating what social scientists term “cognitive closure,” where the mind becomes impervious to new information.

This explains why showing Trump supporters factual evidence often reinforced rather than corrected their misconceptions, a phenomenon called the “backfire effect.” Each attempt to debunk the lies was interpreted as further evidence of an establishment or “deep state” conspiracy, strengthening rather than weakening the false belief. As decades of research into cults shows, when identity becomes fused with a falsehood, challenging the lie feels like an attack on the person’s very sense of self.

This psychological manipulation has deep roots in what political theorist Hannah Arendt observed about totalitarianism: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Trump doesn’t just lie; he systematically destroys Americans’ ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. And in that epistemic rubble, democracy itself cannot stand.16

The Big Lie and January 6th

When Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, he did what he had done throughout his career when faced with failure: he denied reality and claimed victory.

“We have won this election,” Trump falsely declared at 2:30 a.m. on November 4, with millions of votes still to be counted. “Frankly, we did win this election. . . . This is a fraud on the American public.”17

What followed was the most sustained and dangerous assault on electoral truth in modern American history. It was, unambiguously, a coordinated campaign to delegitimize a free and fair election through false claims, groundless lawsuits, and ultimately, incitement to violent insurrection.

Like most Americans, I watched in horror as this unfolded, but still found it hard to believe an American president would go so far as to try to overturn an election he’d clearly lost. The components of Trump’s campaign were unprecedented in American history:

· False claims of fraud in key states, all repeatedly debunked by election officials from both parties, independent experts, and dozens of courts

· Baseless lawsuits, with over sixty filed, almost all dismissed for lack of evidence or legal standing18

· Pressure on state officials, including Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Biden’s victory in the state19

· Conspiracy theories about voting machines, including wild and utterly false claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines had changed votes from Trump to Biden

· Alternative slates of “electors” in seven states Biden won, where Trump supporters created fake Electoral College certificates declaring Trump the winner20

None of these claims were true. The 2020 election was, as Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security called it, “the most secure in American history.”21 Hand recounts, machine audits, court reviews, and independent analyses all confirmed the same reality: Joe Biden won the election fair and square.

But truth wasn’t the point. The point was to create enough doubt, enough confusion, enough anger to justify unprecedented actions to overturn the election results. Or, at a minimum, to so thoroughly delegitimize Biden’s presidency that Trump could maintain his grip on the Republican Party and then return to power in 2025.

The Big Lie about the election of 2020 worked because Trump had spent years preparing the ground. He had spent years systematically attacking the media, had undermined institutions throughout his first term, and had conditioned his supporters to believe that only he could be trusted. We should have seen it coming: in 2016, he’d repeatedly claimed that any election he lost must have been “rigged,” establishing his fraudulent narrative before any votes were even cast.22

On January 6, 2021, as we all watched live on TV, the lie turned violent. Thousands of Trump supporters, convinced the election had been stolen, stormed the US Capitol to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. Five people died in connection with the riot. Approximately 140 police officers were injured, many seriously.23

All of this violence—unprecedented in modern American history—­was driven by a lie. Interviews with arrested rioters consistently revealed they believed they were responding to a stolen election, fighting to “stop the steal” and restore Trump to his rightful position. Many expressed shock when confronted with evidence that their beliefs were based on falsehoods.24

For hours, Trump watched the violence unfold on television, refusing to call for the rioters to stop despite urgent pleas from allies, staff, and family members. When he finally released a video message hours into the assault, he told the rioters, “We love you. You’re very special,” while continuing to claim the election had been stolen.25

Even after the Capitol was cleared and Congress reconvened to complete the certification process, 147 Republican lawmakers—including eight senators—­voted against certifying Biden’s electoral victory in at least one state, effectively endorsing the lie that had just inspired a violent attack on their own workplace.26

The January 6 insurrection represented the logical culmination of Trump’s yearslong assault on truth. When lies become the foundation of political identity, when falsity is elevated over fact as a governing principle, violence becomes inevitable. People who believe an election has truly been stolen, who believe their country is being taken from them through fraud, who believe they are fighting for democracy itself can justify almost any action.

After all, wouldn’t you or I do the same or something close to it if we truly believed an election had been stolen? Isn’t that notion of illegitimate representation what the American Revolution was based on?

The Human Cost

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss weren’t the only individuals whose lives were shattered by Trump’s machinery of disinformation.

Election workers all across the country faced threats, harassment, and intimidation in scenes reminiscent of a third-world banana republic. In Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and other battleground states, officials who had done nothing more than accurately count votes and report the results found themselves targets of online mobs, social media doxxing, protesters at their homes, and explicit death threats.

Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, received messages threatening his family after he defended the integrity of the city’s election results. “You lied. You brought fraud. Your kids are now gonna suffer,” read one message.27 Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson had armed protesters outside her home while she was decorating for Christmas with her young son.28

Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia, made an emotional public plea in December 2020: “Mr. President . . . Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt, someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed.”29

Capitol Police officers suffered both physical and psychological trauma from the January 6 attack that Trump provoked. Officer Harry Dunn, an African American who faced racial slurs and physical assaults during the riot, told interviewers that he struggled with depression and emotional distress as a result. Officer Michael Fanone, who was beaten and tased by the mob, suffered a heart attack and brain injury. Four officers who responded to the attack later died by suicide.30

When truth is erased and replaced with politically convenient fiction, people become collateral damage. When facts become optional and “alternative facts” gain currency, the most vulnerable bear the heaviest burden. When violence becomes the enforcement mechanism for lies, democracy itself is in peril.

The GOP’s Faustian Bargain

In the immediate aftermath of January 6, it briefly seemed Republican leaders might finally break with Trump and reject the Big Lie.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on the House floor, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.”31 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”32

But this moment of clarity quickly evaporated. Within weeks, McCarthy was at Mar-a-Lago, posing for photos with Trump. The Republican Party as a whole recommitted itself to the Big Lie.

Why? Because the lie worked.

It worked as a fundraising tool, bringing in hundreds of millions from grassroots donors convinced they were fighting election fraud.

It worked as a base mobilization strategy, keeping Republican voters engaged and angry.

It worked as a pretext for voter suppression legislation, with Republican-­­controlled legislatures in nineteen states passing thirty-four laws restricting voting access in 2021 alone, all under the guise of addressing “election integrity” concerns that their own lies had created.33

It worked as a loyalty test, allowing the party to purge dissidents like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger who dared speak truth about the election and the insurrection.

This wasn’t driven by a genuine belief in widespread or even actual fraud. Multiple investigations by groups from the FBI to the media told us all that many Republican officials and right-wing media figures privately acknowledged Biden’s victory while publicly claiming otherwise. Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham ridiculed Trump’s election fraud claims in private text messages at the same time they brazenly promoted those same lies on the air, costing Fox hundreds of millions in successful lawsuits.34

This embrace of the Big Lie—across the GOP, conservative media, and even the tepid reporting on mainstream venues—showed the world a coldly calculated political strategy worthy of Goebbels: the Republican Party’s elders and elected officials concluded that truth was less valuable than raw power, that facts were less important than maintaining an intense, emotion-driven tribal loyalty, and that the sacred integrity of American elections was an acceptable sacrifice on the altar of political power.

Why It Matters

The biggest lesson we can carry away from this horrific experience is that the greatest threat to American democracy isn’t some random foreign interference, any particular procedural weaknesses in our electoral system, or even the voter suppression policies promoted by the GOP.

Instead, it’s the very real threat of an authoritarian domestic movement built on lies, funded by billionaires, enabled by cynical political operators and right-wing media, and believed by millions of Americans who’ve been systematically cut off from factual reality and instead live in media and social media bubbles.

From birtherism to the Big Lie, Trump and his enablers constructed, brick by dishonest brick, an alternative reality so powerful that millions now inhabit it fully, unreachable by fact-checkers, judicial rulings, or even the observable reality that’s so obvious to the majority of Americans. Unless this machinery of lies (and the Supreme Court decision that helped create it) is confronted and dismantled, we all face a dystopian future where elections still happen but losers never concede, facts never overcome intentional fictions, and where (like in so many banana republics) democracy exists in name only.

The story of Ruby Freeman—an ordinary citizen who just wanted to do the right thing and whose life was nearly destroyed just for doing her civic duty—is both a warning and a call to action. Her experience tells us the human cost of political lies, highlights the vulnerability of individuals caught in the machinery of political lies, and the moral bankruptcy of today’s Trump-driven Republican Party that’s willing to sacrifice truth and lives on the altar of naked power.

“Do you know how it feels to have the President of the United States target you?” Freeman asked in her congressional testimony. Now we do. And the question we all now face as a result is whether we will allow such targeting to continue, or whether we will finally reject the politics of lies and reclaim democracy’s essential foundation: truth.

FYI, I’ll be a guest on Ali Velshi‘s show on MSNOW at 10 AM Eastern time, 7 AM Pacific time, internet and news gods willing.

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Chapter 6: The Death of Democracy Is Profitable

Jakelin Caal Maquin was only seven years old when she died in the custody of our government.

This little girl with bright brown eyes had journeyed thousands of miles from Guatemala’s remote highlands with her father, Nery Caal. Unlike the immigrants constantly demonized by Trump, they followed the law, surrendering to Border Patrol agents at a legal port of entry in New Mexico and formally requesting asylum.

Already ill upon arrival, Jakelin’s condition was ignored. When she began vomiting and having seizures during a bus transfer, there was no medical equipment to help her. By the time they reached a hospital in El Paso, her body temperature had peaked at 105.9 degrees. She died fewer than forty-eight hours after arriving in the United States from dehydration, shock, and liver failure.1

The Department of Homeland Security immediately deflected responsibility, claiming the family hadn’t consumed food or water for days. Her father quickly exposed this lie through an attorney, stating they had adequate sustenance throughout their journey.2

No translator was present during intake. Forms were in English, a language neither spoke. The facility was overcrowded, understaffed, and with far from adequate medical care.

Trump’s new system—designed to punish, not protect—functioned exactly as intended.

While Jakelin’s story briefly made headlines, another story didn’t: the one playing out on Wall Street in the weeks following her death. Stock prices for CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of America’s largest private prison companies, rose steadily. These corporations made fortunes from contracts to manage ICE detention centers, contracts made possible by Trump’s brutal immigration policies. Their business model depended on keeping migrants detained as long as possible at the lowest possible cost.3

This wasn’t just tragic. It was profitable.

Throughout my decades as an entrepreneur—from starting The Electronics Joint in East Lansing when I was seventeen to my current radio program—I’ve never encountered businesspeople who deliberately set out to profit from human suffering. Yet here we are, in supposedly the most advanced democracy on Earth, watching a machinery of cruelty generating reliable returns for investors.

Jakelin’s death wasn’t an accident or the result of a “broken” system. It was the inevitable outcome of a system transformed to serve profits over people. The GOP’s multidecade embrace of “public/private partnerships” outsourcing government functions to for-profit industry has produced a system where cruelty isn’t a bug: it’s a feature.

The Business of Cruelty

The defining feature of Trump’s governance is transactional authoritarianism like in Hungary or Russia: the wielding of state power not to achieve public good but to reward friends, punish enemies, and enrich connected interests. This approach directly parallels the transactional worldview we explored in Chapter 1, where his father, Fred, taught him that every relationship is purely a matter of winning and losing.

Under previous administrations of both parties, migration was treated as a complex issue requiring both humanitarian responses and security concerns. The system wasn’t perfect, but there was at least nominal recognition—reinforced by both American and international law—that asylum seekers deserved humane treatment.

Trump replaced this approach with deliberate cruelty, designed to deter immigration by making the process as painful as possible. As one senior administration official told the Washington Post, Trump loved the idea of people being “afraid of coming.”4

This cruelty was first manifested in his first term’s “zero tolerance” family separation, which tore more than 5,500 children from their parents with no adequate system to track them.5 Nearly a thousand of those children the first Trump administration trafficked into shady “Christian” adoption schemes remain missing.

Underpinning these barbarous policies was a web of private contractors eager to profit. GEO Group and CoreCivic saw revenues soar, making over $1.3 billion from ICE contracts in 2019 alone. GEO Group’s stock nearly doubled in the months after Trump’s 2016 election.6

Caliburn International, operating the largest detention center for migrant children in Homestead, Florida, charged the government $775 per day per child, roughly three times the cost of a room at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. Not coincidentally, Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, joined Caliburn’s board shortly after leaving the White House.7

These corporations didn’t just passively benefit: they actively lobbied for harsher policies. GEO Group and CoreCivic spent $4.5 million on federal lobbying during Trump’s first presidency and donated hundreds of thousands to his inauguration and Republican campaigns. CoreCivic’s CEO told investors in 2019 that the company expected “meaningful growth” due to immigration detention needs.8

The perverse incentives were obvious. Private detention companies had every reason to maximize detainee numbers, minimize spending on care, lobby for harsher policies, and fight alternatives to detention, even when those alternatives were more humane and cost-effective.

Internal documents from GEO Group revealed the company targeted an “occupancy rate” of 95 percent in immigration detention facilities, effectively creating a corporate quota for human beings in cages.9 This mirrors exactly how Trump, as we saw in Chapter 3, operated his business empire, prioritizing the appearance of success and short-term profit over long-term sustainability or human welfare.

This wasn’t merely corruption in the conventional sense. It was, even worse, the systematic repurposing of government power to serve private interests, transforming human suffering from a problem to be solved into a profitable commodity to be traded.10

The Authoritarian Profit Model

Jakelin’s death illustrates a larger truth: authoritarian governance isn’t just politically dangerous; it’s economically rewarding for the right people.

Trump’s presidency perfected what I call the Authoritarian Profit Model, with four key components:

Deregulation makes corporations richer by removing protections for workers, consumers, and the environment. Trump’s first administration eliminated over one hundred rules on everything from power plant emissions to workplace safety, delivering hundreds of billions in savings to corporations while imposing enormous costs on public health. His second term immediately restarted this process, with his EPA administrator announcing what the agency called “the most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history” in March 2025, targeting dozens of environmental rules for elimination.11

Privatization shifts public services to unaccountable private firms, creating profit centers while reducing democratic control. Beyond immigration detention, Trump expanded privatization in education (through DeVos’s school vouchers), health care (through dismantling the ACA), and infrastructure through public-private partnerships that socialized costs while privatizing profits. In his second term, this approach has expanded to nearly every federal function through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is systematically outsourcing government operations to private contractors.12

Nationalism creates enemies who can be blamed for problems actually caused by corporate exploitation. By demonizing immigrants, Muslims, and “disloyal” Americans, Trump created pretexts for military spending, border militarization, and surveillance, all massive profit centers for contractor-donors. This technique draws directly from Roy Cohn’s playbook, as we saw in Chapter 2, where creating enemies serves as both distraction and justification for consolidating power.13

Crisis exploitation uses real or manufactured emergencies to override democratic processes and fast-track controversial policies. Whether declaring “national emergencies” for border wall construction or using COVID-19 to suspend environmental regulations, the Trump administration repeatedly used crises as cover for actions that would face significant opposition under normal circumstances.14

Trump didn’t stumble into this model. He inherited its architecture from decades of neoliberal policy beginning with Reagan, which increasingly subordinated democratic governance to market forces. (Louise jokes that when I die, she’ll put “It all started with Reagan!” on my tombstone.)

What distinguished Trump was his willingness to strip away pretense. No more dog whistles or pretending tax cuts for the wealthy would somehow benefit everyone through “trickle-down” effects. Instead, he turned cruelty into performance, using public displays of dominance to thrill his base while distracting from the wholesale transfer of wealth happening behind the curtain.

As Adam Serwer memorably put it in The Atlantic: “The cruelty is the point.”15 But what Serwer missed was the profitability of that cruelty, serving as both a spectacle for the masses and an enrichment vehicle for GOP-aligned elites.

The Pandemic: Profiting from Catastrophe

If any doubts remained about the Trump administration’s prioritization of profit over human life, the COVID-19 pandemic erased them. The worst public health crisis since 1918 became a case study in how authoritarian governance transforms collective tragedy into private gain.

Trump’s incompetence and focus on the 2020 election gave America the highest per capita death rate of any major country. Over a million Americans died, almost half unnecessarily, according to The Lancet.16

He intentionally downplayed the virus’s lethality, comparing it to seasonal flu while privately admitting to Bob Woodward it was “deadly stuff.”17 He mocked masks, promoted unproven treatments, and pushed for premature reopening against expert advice.

While ordinary Americans suffered unprecedented health and economic devastation, for certain segments—particularly those with Trump administration connections—the pandemic was an extraordinary profit opportunity:

· American billionaires gained over $1.1 trillion between March and December 2020, a 40 percent increase during a period when millions lost jobs, health care, and homes.18

· Pharmaceutical companies received billions in public funding to develop vaccines with minimal conditions. Moderna, for example, received $2.5 billion in taxpayer money, then patented a COVID vaccine developed with significant contributions from NIH scientists and priced it for maximum profit.19

· Well-connected businesses received billions through the Paycheck Protection Program while small businesses were shut out. Companies linked to Trump family members, administration officials, and donors received millions.20

Meanwhile, oversight was systematically obstructed. Trump removed the inspector general tasked with overseeing the $2 trillion CARES Act, limited the congressionally created Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, and refused to comply with transparency requirements.21

The more chaos Trump created, the more predictable the markets became for those with inside information. Several senators sold stocks after receiving classified briefings before the public understood the pandemic’s severity. Cabinet officials and White House staff had unprecedented access to policy decisions and market-moving information.22

The pandemic revealed in the starkest terms that the authoritarian profit model doesn’t just corrode democracy: it kills people. Literally, measurably, and unnecessarily.

Climate Sabotage for Profit

Trump’s climate policies revealed how the same model applies to slow-moving catastrophes. He initiated the most comprehensive rollback of environmental protections in American history, eliminating over one hundred environmental rules including major climate policies like the Clean Power Plan. He pulled America out of the Paris Climate Agreement, making us the only nation to withdraw from this landmark effort.23

These weren’t ideological decisions but economically motivated acts of environmental sabotage, designed to benefit industries that had heavily funded Republican campaigns. Oil, gas, and coal companies saw record access and influence. Coal magnate Robert Murray, who donated $300,000 to Trump’s inauguration, provided an “action plan” that became a blueprint for environmental rollbacks.24

The financial benefits for these industries were immediate and substantial, while the costs were socialized: borne by communities suffering from increased pollution, workers exposed to toxic chemicals, future generations facing a hostile climate, and vulnerable populations already on the front lines of climate change.25

Indigenous communities like the Standing Rock Sioux saw their lands threatened by expedited pipeline approvals. Predominantly Black and Latino “fence-line communities” near industrial facilities experienced increased toxic emissions as enforcement actions against polluters plummeted.26

In a functioning democracy, the overwhelming public interest in environmental protection would have prevailed over the narrow interests of polluting industries. But in Trump’s America, only shareholder value and campaign contributions mattered, even at the expense of planetary habitability.

His second term has accelerated this pattern. Not only are environmental regulations being eliminated at unprecedented speed, but climate scientists have been systematically purged from the EPA, NOAA, and the Department of the Interior, replaced by industry lobbyists. The very phrase “climate change” has been scrubbed from government websites and communications, as if eliminating the words could eliminate the reality.

Weaponizing the Military and Surveillance State

One of the most reliable profit centers in the authoritarian playbook is what Eisenhower termed the military-industrial complex. Trump, despite occasional rhetorical gestures toward reducing foreign commitments, proved exceptionally skilled at channeling taxpayer dollars to this sector.

During his first presidency, defense spending rose to $740 billion, the highest level since World War II when adjusted for inflation. The five largest defense contractors received over $150 billion in Pentagon contracts in fiscal year 2020 alone.27

The administration pushed through controversial arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other regimes with troubling human rights records, overriding congressional objections. The grateful Saudis later funded Trump’s son-in-law’s investment firm with $2 billion.28

What distinguished Trump’s approach was the increasing militarization of domestic policy, deploying weapons and surveillance technologies developed for warfare against American civilians, particularly immigrants and protesters.

Border security became a lucrative frontier for the military-­industrial complex. The “border wall” was less about migration management than channeling billions to contractors like Fisher Sand & Gravel, whose CEO pitched Trump directly on Fox News.29

Beyond physical barriers, the border region became a testing ground for surveillance technologies from companies like Palantir, which received over $1.5 billion in government contracts during Trump’s first presidency. These technologies—including facial recognition, drone surveillance, and predictive analytics—were deployed against migrants before expanding to monitor protesting citizens.30

This militarized approach reached its apex during racial justice protests following George Floyd’s murder. When demonstrations erupted in Washington, DC. Trump deployed National Guard troops, Border Patrol tactical units, and unidentified federal officers who used tear gas and rubber bullets against peaceful protesters, all for a presidential photo opportunity. In Portland, federal officers with no identification drove around in panel vans, snatching protesters off the street.31

This wasn’t just political theater; it was a business opportunity for companies producing riot gear, less-lethal weapons, and surveillance equipment. As police departments nationwide received federal funding for military equipment, companies manufacturing tear gas, Tasers, and surveillance systems saw surging demand.32

In Trump’s second term, this domestic militarization has expanded dramatically. Facial recognition systems initially deployed at the border are being implemented in major cities.

Law enforcement agencies from ICE to local police departments have received expanded funding for surveillance technologies with virtually no systems to make sure they’re being used ethically or even legally. The distinction between counterterrorism and domestic policing has effectively collapsed, with profit-seeking contractors supplying both sectors.

January 6: The Final Payday

Even after Trump incited a violent mob to storm the Capitol—the most flagrant assault on our nation from within since the Civil War—corporate America’s response seemed appropriate at first.

Multiple companies issued press releases condemning Trump’s role in inciting the violence while pausing political donations to the 147 Republican members of Congress who’d voted against certifying Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. Those announcements generated positive press coverage, creating the impression of a principled corporate response.

But within months, the money flowed again. By August 2021, over sixty major corporations had resumed donating to election deniers, including Toyota, Walmart, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson.33

Political action committees from industry groups like the US Chamber of Commerce also quickly returned to funding politicians who had voted to overturn the election. Dark money groups continued channeling corporate funds to these same politicians without the reputational risk of visible contributions.34

CEOs issued vague but high-sounding statements about unity and democracy. PR firms crafted messaging that let companies appear concerned while avoiding any substantive commitments. Lobbyists worked behind the scenes to make sure these corporations weren’t held to account, and the Republican politicians—who regularly voted for whatever the corporations wanted—remained unscathed.

This rapid reversion to business as usual happened, tragically, because in Trump’s new version of America the greatest sin wasn’t attempting to overthrow democracy; it was losing access to politicians who could deliver tax cuts, deregulation, and government contracts in exchange for campaign cash allowed by five Republicans on the Supreme Court.

That corporate response revealed what’s commonly called crony capitalism or oligarchy. When forced to choose between protecting our democracy and political access, most major companies chose the latter. Their executives correctly calculated that the public would quickly forget their complicity while the profits they made from political influence—including contracts, subsidies, and tax cuts—would endure.

Why It Matters

Jakelin Maquin’s tragic story is not an outlier; it symbolizes the post-Reagan, post–Citizens United transformation of American governance into a profit-making enterprise where the suffering of our fellow humans became a moneymaking opportunity.

Jakelin didn’t die because of policy, but because that policy put profit over protection, cruelty over humanity. This happens when democracy is gutted from within and sold to the highest bidder, the ultimate expression of the crony capitalism we detailed in Chapter 5, where billionaire donors purchase policy outcomes regardless of public interest.

Donald Trump didn’t invent this system. The corruption of our government has been rolling along since the Reagan Revolution, accelerating with Reagan’s neoliberal economics, corporate deregulation, and the post–Citizens United flood of money into politics. But Trump’s administration perfected it, stripping away any pretenses that our government exists to serve the common good while hiding the nearly medieval machinery of exploitation beneath it.

What makes Trumpism unique isn’t its corruption but its brazenness, essentially bragging that governance is just business by other means, that elected office should become a vehicle for private enrichment, and that human suffering is acceptable if it generates the right quarterly returns.

His second term brought this logic to its natural conclusion. When Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began systematically dismantling federal agencies, it quickly became clear to anybody paying attention that it wasn’t actually about efficiency, waste, or fraud. It was, instead, about removing obstacles to profit-taking while eliminating consumer protections, gutting worker’s rights to unionize, doing away with environmental protections, ending investigations into Musk’s companies, and discarding any other limits on corporate and oligarchic power.

The proof was right there in front of us all: nobody was arrested or prosecuted for fraud; firing people, like the 7,000 removed from the Social Security Administration, couldn’t possibly have increased efficiency (instead, the program was made less efficient); and not a single clear item of “waste” has yet been identified (unless you consider saving the lives of starving African children “waste”).

The brazenness of this scam forces us to confront this truth head-on: that authoritarianism isn’t just dangerous but profitable, that democracy’s decline has powerful economic beneficiaries who will resist its restoration, and that oligarchs will lie to achieve their goals. If we fail to recognize these simple lessons, we’ll continue to live in a nation where the next Jakelin dies in silence at the same time quarterly profits soar in part because of her death.

The greatest threat American democracy faces today isn’t any single leader, political party, or even ideology. Instead, it’s the systematic subordination of democracy to market forces by a nakedly corrupt administration that views our constitutional system as quaint but archaic. It’s the belief that everything, including free speech, liberty, and even basic constitutional human rights, should only be available to the highest bidder among the nation’s wealthy.

This is the machinery that made Trump possible, facilitated by five Republicans on the Supreme Court and a supine media. And now in his second term, the contraption is running at full speed, steadily eating and disposing of what remains of the rule of law, democracy, and human decency.

As we’ll see in Chapter 8, this profit-driven erosion of democracy and our basic rights inevitably leads to America being captured by our nation’s oligarchs and their foreign allies, a situation where the public interest collapses while for-profit interests thrive. And as Chapter 9 will demonstrate, this domestic corruption then becomes an internationalized strategy, with wannabe autocrats worldwide learning from and reinforcing Trump’s approach.

The billionaire donors described in Chapter 5 didn’t just fund Trump’s campaigns: they funded this entire transformation of governance from public service into private profit centers. And unless we confront and dismantle this machinery, Trump may indeed become what Chapter 11 warns of: the last American president to be elected by a truly democratic system.